Being Malay in Indonesia: Histories, Hopes and Citizenship in the Riau Archipelago

Conclusion

242 Being Malay in Indonesia 242 Conclusion In January 2012, as I was finalising the manuscript of this book, I received a phone call from Tirto, a high-ranking civil servant in Jakarta. He wanted my advice on how to conduct a good research interview. Tirto explained that he was about to participate in an official audit of Indonesia’s regional autonomy, a project that would evaluate whether or not decentralisation had been a success, attempt to detect instances of best practice that could be held up as exemplary , and make recommendations as to how to adjust laws and policies so that Indonesia could become as well-governed and as democratic as possible. Several issues were causing him particular concern: high levels of corruption in local government; the prevalent practice of buying votes; the rise of regional leaders who ran their regencies and towns as “little fiefdoms” (kerajaan kecil ); disappointing levels of investment and human resource development in newly autonomous regencies; and the apparent hardening of regionalist, ethnic and fundamentalist religious sentiments that stood sharply at odds with the national ethic of “unity in diversity”. These were familiar concerns. Questions of the kind Tirto was asking have saturated public discourse since the end of the New Order and have strongly influenced the ways Indonesia’s decentralisation and democratisation have been assessed by figures ranging from Jakartan bureaucrats and Indonesian media pundits to Riau Islanders sitting in coffee shops and international academics gathering at conferences . They provoke a series of intriguing reflections. How widespread are these unintended effects of regional autonomy? Why do they seem to occur in some areas more than others? Are they necessarily as undesirable as many accounts would make them seem? Would their presence mean that regional autonomy has “failed”? Such questions are understandably compelling to people who care about Indonesia. Yet, even as I gave Tirto what advice I could on Conclusion 243 research methodology, I was struck by how much this all-too-familiar list of questions seemed to neglect. Although issues such as corruption, “money politics”, or foreign direct investment have obvious ramifications for people’s day-to-day existence, Tirto’s research agenda did little to acknowledge the many other impacts that decentralisation has had upon the ways in which Indonesians understand themselves, relate to others and inhabit the world around them. Decentralisation has not just influenced the material and political conditions in which people live; it has also transformed the character of their everyday lives, prompting them to ask new questions about who they are and their place within the nation, province, town and neighbourhood. Tirto’s own questioning of decentralisation’s consequences is itself evidence of this trend: a form of critical public citizenship quite distinct from civic identity under the New Order. In his case, the new questions were mainly procedural, inviting reflection upon regional autonomy as a political process. Such questioning is by no means absent from the Riau Archipelago. However, the very tangible consequence of regional autonomy in the Riau Islands, namely the creation of a new province , made different questions stand out as especially urgent. These were concerned less with “regional autonomy” in the abstract and more with the specificities of the new Riau Islands Province and what it would mean to be living within its borders. Some questions were entirely novel. Issues such as whether local government officials were capable of running a province, or how the Riau Islands would rank alongside other provinces in national indices of development, were pressing concerns which had not previously needed to be thought about. Other questions were more familiar but took on a new relevance in the context of the nascent province. The matter of how the Riau Archipelago’s population could be made more competitive, for example, had always been of concern to inhabitants of the islands. However, since the region’s “backwardness” was blamed on underinvestment and neglect at the hands of a “colonial” Pekanbaru administration, breaking the islands away from Mainland Riau had always been a necessary first step towards resolving this problem. Once autonomy had been achieved, the question of how to increase competitiveness re-emerged as a central issue in public discourse. Likewise, while the definition of Malayness had long been a question of academic interest in the islands, it took on 244 Being Malay in Indonesia an immense political significance once a province had been created “for Malays”. Riau Islanders were...