Sutan Sjahrir was a leading figure in the struggle for Indonesia’s independence. By most standards he achieved eminence and suffered political decline at a remarkably early age. By twenty-five he had made sufficient impact in the nationalist movement for the Dutch to cast him into a lengthy exile. At thirty-six he brilliantly seized an opportunity and became Prime Minister of his country, and for two years guided the young republic through some of its most difficult days. His work at this time was to have the most durable impact, largely determining the character of the Indonesian revolution, as a national rather than a social revolution, and shifting the emphasis of action towards “diplomacy” rather than “struggle”. As a young, western-oriented intellectual leader, he was successfully setting the pace of political developments, and with western liberal democracy at the height of its prestige, he appeared to represent the future. But by the time Indonesia’s independence strugglc ended in 1949, he was 40, and already pushed From the centre of political life; he was never again to hold high office or exert decisive influence. The years before his death were years of progressively deepening political Failure, ending with several years of imprisonment at the hands of the republic he had helped to create. Judgments of success and failure in political life often prove difficult, and this is particularly so in Sjahrir’s case. In his political career it is easy to point both to outstanding “successes” and to devastating “failures”. He showed great foresight and a capacity for penetrating analysis in his attitude to the war, and considerable courage in his actions during the Japanese occupation. His success in recruiting a dynamic and talented following among the young intellectuals of occupation Jakarta has been sympathetically described by Legge.
His political skill was evident in his grasping the moment to take power from the “collaborationist” politicians who constituted the Republic of Indonesia’s first cabinet in 1945, but the same events also demonstrated his integrity and acuity. The analysis contained in his pamphlet Perjuangan Kita (Our Struggle) displayed both penetrating honesty and a cool perceptiveness. He anticipated the Cold War and its implications for Indonesia at an early stage. And he represented the Republic at the United Nations most impressively, thus playing a major part in gathering international, and especially American, support for the Indonesian cause, which proved decisive in overcoming Dutch intransigence. These are testaments to his brilliance and high character, and demonstrations of his “success” Sjahrir was a committed nationalist with a deep abhorrence of colonialism, and hence his role in creating an independent Indonesia marks his career as one of high achievement. However, in contrast to some who worked for independence, he was never merely a nationalist, and he had good reason to be profoundly disappointed with the fruits of independence. Nationalism took a place in his political thinking alongside tolerance, democracy, internationalism, socialism and modernity. Moreover these strands in his thinking stood in a relationship of priority to one another, as the tests of political life would show. in the development of an Indonesian society to match his ideals, his ambitions remained largely unfulfilled. Indeed, from his loss of the Prime Ministership in 1947, his career followed a path of successively more intense periods of disappointment and remoteness from power. Thus, having been one of the principal architects of the Indonesian victory, he was subsequently unable to move the political current of the new Republic decisively in the ideological direction he favoured. In the brief period of Indonesia’s experiment with multi-party parliamentary democracy, the party which was Sjahrir’s vehicle, the Indonesian Socialist Party (PSI), proved an electoral failure.
The PSI’s precursor, the undivided Socialist Party (PS), had been a major force during the revolutionary period, and the PSI itself had constituted a significant minority voice in some of the parliamentary cabinets of the early fifties. The party had in fact maintained a degree of influence on government far greater than its true level of support, or even its rather generous representation in the unelected provisional parliament of 1950-55, would have warranted. In the event, the party polled a mere two per cent of the national vote when elections were finally held in 1955. The party suffered further decline in the late fifties, and was banned in 1960 under Sukarno’s “Guided Democracy”. In 1962 Sjahrir and several other leaders, mostly associated with the PSI or the modernist Islamic party Masjumi, were imprisoned. After the 1965 coup attempt the politicians were released but neither party was revived in its original form. Legge argues that despite this apparent failure, the PSI “stream” in Indonesian political thinking represents a distinctive “moral and intellectual strand within Indonesian public life”. Certainly significant elements in the political elite and in the wider society have continued to concern themselves with themes which were important for the PSI, such as modernity, egalitarianism, social justice and respect for individual rights; but for the most part,national policy has not emphasized these goals either before or after 1966. Public policy during the Sukarno period mostly favored "neo - traditionalist” responses to the challenge of social change and the diversion of political energies into external causes such as the campaign to gain control of West Papua and the confrontation campaign against Malaysia. The New Order government has stressed economic growth, the maintenance of social order and cohesion, and the control of such democratic institutions as exist. Nonetheless there is clearly some link between the success of the regime’s economic policies and the type of economic thinking developed by those associated with the PSI in the earlier period, and indeed some former PSI members such as Sumitro have been directly involved in this policy-making. Likewise, some of the methods and standpoints which Sjahrir and his circle adopted may have continuing app to universal or humanistic values: Y.B. Mangunwijaya, a great admirer of Sjahrir, lists humanitarianism, anti-fascism, democracy, clean government, honesty in politics and historical awareness as elements of Sjahrir’s thinking and action which he believes to have continuing relevance. Relevance, however, does not mean prevalence. Legge proposes pragmatism and rational policy-making as central elements in the PSI’s, and Sjahrir’s, mode of political action.
Certainly these elements have been to the fore since 1966, and this is no doubt in part due to the enduring impact of Sjahrir and the PSI on Indonesian political culture. But can this limited impact mask the essentially failed nature of Sjahrir’s endeavour? Rationality was certainly essential to Sjahrir’s thinking, but it stood alongside an ideological standpoint in which democratic values and a pragmatic socialism were indispensable elements, albeit that both of these were complex and qualified. Contrasts as dramatic as that between the politically successful Sjahrir of the forties and the political frustration of the late fifties leave open a great risk of oversimplification, even caricature. Hence it is important to indicate fine shades of difference if possible, highlighting the subtlety of the contrast as well as its significance. In this sense, the recounting of history can and ought to be a matter of “chromatic” technique rather than “dialonics”, as James Boon has proposed. The biographical approach carries a rich potential for fulfilling this need, charting the slow and the sudden changes over time, alongside the evolving and the static qualities of the self in the midst of other individuals and alternative selves. It ought to reach beyond binarism and typology to convey impressions of textures and tones of a life. For our present purpose, this means appreciating Sjahrir’s talents and achievements while squarely facing his shortcoming - one should not cancel the other.
In dealing with biographical subjects who come from cultures different to the biographer’s own, it is very easy to misjudge the significance of cultural factors in shaping the subject’s development, either by resorting too readily to cultural explanations or by underestimating their value. People live in a web of culture, but they are not entirely its prisoners; they remain individuals with distinct personalities and they can make choices. They can also work towards new cultural arrangements. Moreover, their lives are played out within a historical context, so that events well beyond their personal, immediate reach can affect their consciousness and behaviour. Part of the task of biography is to unravel these interconnected elements. Examining Sjahrir’s career, including the later, arguably “failed” phase, from a biographical perspective may make it possible to move closer to delineating the interplay of culture, personality and historical circumstance which determined the texture of his political career and his ultimate frustration. Two aspects of culture arise here: the cultural factors which helped to shape Sjahrir’s style, outlook and system of meaning, and the socio-cultural environment in which Indonesian politics of his time was played out. The cultural element of Sjahrir’s make up is especially difficult, in two ways. First, how much did cultural orientation affect his political life? And second, how is one to describe or define the cultural framework of his life, when he was exposed to such a complex range of cultural intluences as was available to him in colonial Indonesia? He was born at Padang Panjang in the West Sumatran highlands, the heart of Minangkabau culture, but spent most of his childhood outside the Minangkabau area in the city of Medan. His family were securely meshed into the Dutch administrative and educational systems.
Sjahrir’s education provided him with a deep grounding in western ideas and values: before ever setting foot on European soil, Sjahrir had spent years in a westernized cultural-intellectual milieu, and had thoroughly absorbed western values and techniques. Little of Minangkabau tradition or subjective self-identification seems to have remained with him, and he is the first choice of scholars wishing to illustrate the stereotype of a westernized Indonesian intellectual. The question of identification is important; it has been called “the most important psychological aspect of culture - the bridge between culture and personality”; hence, the means by which the private self accommodates the demands and options of life in society. To the extent that evidence of Minangkabau identification on Sjahrir’s part is wanting, we are entitled to question the importance of Minangkabau orientation as a factor in explaining or interpreting his career. The question arises here of considering adaptability to modernizing influences as a distinctively Minangkabau cultural attribute. A disproportionately large number of Indonesia’s twentieth century nationalist leaders and other intellectuals were drawn from the Minangkabau. This phenomenon reflects the broader success of Minangkabau in economic and administrative spheres. The view that cultural adaptability, influenced by the tradition of merantau (temporary migration by men beyond the Minangkabau area), played a major part in this is a persuasive one. In this view it is a paradoxical truth that the essence of Minangkabau identity may lie in a readiness to accept extraneous cultural influences. And yet this fails to explain the great variation in the quality and extent of “deculturation” which various Minangkabau intellectuals exhibited. Swift points out that important Minangkabau politicians were to be found at all points on the Indonesian ideological spectrum but the differences among them go well beyond ideology in the narrow sense. One need only consider a selection of the more eminent Minangkabau intellectuals of the Indonesian mid-century - Hatta, Sjahrir, Natsir, Haji Agus Salim and Tan Malaka among politicians, and the writers Idrus, Chain! Anwar and Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana - to realize the broad spectrum of responses to cultural options: to Minangkabau identity, understandings of “Indonesianness”, responses to modernity and attitudes to tradition, religious adherence and outlooks, and styles of public action. Again, we are entitled to ask how far the concept of Minangkabau culture can take us in understanding why particular individuals developed the characteristics they did. Swift also convincingly argues that a central feature of Minangkabau public life is individual competitiveness. Some other ethnic groups, such as the Bataks, have achieved economic and other success in group frameworks but this, he suggests, would not satisfy Minangkabau ambitions, as they are less prepared to give group advantage priority over, or even a place alongside, individual accomplishment. If we apply this idea to Sjahrir, complex results emerge. His style of thought was certainly individualistic; he was an intellectual with independent habits of thought, and the PSI attracted and sought to produce self- sufficient thinkers. And yet, conditions permitting, he generally worked through groups, not as an isolated polemicist, and certainly he was always concerned to recruit a following, even though he did not extend this to a mass movement. Mrazek puts forward an interesting interpretation of Sjahrir’s early career in terms of a distinctively Minangkabau response to the outside world. He relates Sjahrir’s outlook, and especially his “western” rationalism, to the interaction between the pre existing Minangkabau world view and the new dominance of the Dutch ethici which took hold in the early years of the century, and which had a prevailing influence in his education. This interaction was an effort to integrate or associate the western ideals of universalism, dynamism and rationalism with the tradisionals ideals of the Minangkabau. “Minangkabau was their culture but... Dutch-ness was the culture’s highest quality.”
This argument certainly appears to reflect the education received by Sjahrir’s generation of the Indonesian elite, but it seems to fall short in explaining Sjahrir’s particular case, mainly because it fails to explain why Sjahrir’s response should have differed from those of others who experienced similar processes. As already noted, the products of this background ended up with all kinds of outlooks and attitudes to the conflict of tradition and modernity. Sjahrir’s rejection of tradition was quite thoroughgoing, and although it may be argued that his strongest objections were to Javanese rather than Minangkabau tradition, that surely is a function of the very modernization of the Minangkabau which may have brought him to such a position rather than to any active approval of the remaining pre-modern aspects of Minangkabau culture. In other words, he disliked backwardness, regardless of its ethnic associations, rather than reacting negatively to cultural ways because they were alien to the Minangkabau world view. His antagonism to Javanese tradition was doubtless intensified by the concrete frustrations represented by political rivals drawing on this tradition. This is not to suggest that aspects of Minangkabau culture have nothing to contribute to understanding Sjahrir’s development: where they can be related to his concrete experience, they should certainly be taken into account. Education is a case in point, to which I will return later; however not only the content of his education needs to be considered, but also its psychological significance. As well as Minangkabau cultural orientation sits the question of the extent of Sjahrir’s attachment to a developing Indonesian national culture. This is difficult not only because Indonesia’s national culture is not easily described, but also because national consciousness was still only in a formative stage in Sjahrir’s youth. Sjahrir himself played a significant role in the development of important symbols of this national culture. As a nineteen year old he participated in the youth congress which adopted the national anthem and the famous slogan “One nation, one country and one language”. The designation of Malay as the Indonesian national language marked an important step in the development of national culture, and a major move towards cultural independence, legitimizing for nationalistically minded Indonesians a medium for mutual communication which was not the property of the colonisers or of any one ethnic group. Twenty months earlier, not yet eighteen, he had been one of the founding members of the youth group Jong-Indonesie, subsequently Pemuda Indonesia, one of the first such organisations with a national rather than provincial character. This group adopted as its symbol the red and white banner later to become Indonesia’s national flag! Of course these outward trappings are mere symbols, but the rapid succession of new symbolic representations of national identity is indicative of the embryonic nature of Indonesian national culture at the time. It also powerfully underlines the point that the culture of nationhood, like all culture, is ever subject to change and reassessment by those who adhere to it. It offers its adherents options; individuals are to a greater or lesser degree able to choose their cultural reference points. Sjahrir worked to re-direct Indonesia’s cultural practice towards modernity and rationality; the course of events would show the extent of resistance to these endeavours.
Both by circumstance and by his own efforts, Sjahrir’s youth and political career coincided with a time of momentous choices in the referents of Indonesian culture. It is interesting to note that unlike the immediately preceding generation of nationalists including soekarno and hatta, Sjahrir was never a member of a parochial or regional organization; from the start his affiliations were with group which were national as well as nationalist. but it is difficult to use the characteristics of the emergent national culture to explain the kind of of political actor that he became. To the extent that a cultural milieu “produced” him, he was mainly a product of the colonial state, part of a generation who created for the first time a new cultural synthesis which could accurately he called “Indonesian”. He was in fact deeply aware of the absence of a single cultural framework within which an intellectual could operate in Indonesia. In Sjahrir’s view all Indonesian intellectuals were at a great disadvantage where culture was concerned: they were such a tiny proportion of the country’s people, and they were “only beginning to seek a form and a unity” in their outlook and culture! Nonetheless the emergent national cultural framework, fragile and fragmented as it was, is important to understanding his career, as it profoundly influenced the environment within which his political career and personal drama were played out. This took on deep significance after independence when the abiding cultural pluralism of Indonesian society emerged as a major factor in shaping the contours of politics. Cultural difference, or more specifically strong identification among the people with groups divided by cultural antagonisms, was a major element of Indonesia’s post-independence politics. The parties which proved electorally successful were those which managed to attract the support of a distinct socio-cultural stream in Indonesian society. This was especially so in Java, where society is riven by cleavages of cultural and religious orientation, which partly coincide with economic differences. Briefly, these cleavages produced four socio-cultural streams (aliran), each of which gave substantial support to a particular political party in the 1950s.
The devout Moslems or santri (a minority at the time) were split between the religiously purist, modernist, more urbanized and more prosperous stream known as santri moderen, who mostly supported the Masjumi party,and the religiously pluralist (i.e., tolerant of Javanese “impurities” in Islamic practice), conservative, and predominantly rural stream, especially strong in East Java, known as santri kolot who mostly voted for Nahdatul Ulama (NU). Among the non-devout, or syncretist, the aristocratic and bureaucratic elite (priyayi) generally supported the Indonesian Nationalist Party (PNI), as did members of the lower classes subject to their influence. Many other members of the non-devout peasantry gave their vote to the Communist Party (PKI). To some extent this division was also connected to regionalism. Masjumi derived the majority of its support from the strongly Islamic areas of the outer islands, while the other parties’ support was concentrated in Java. This difference in electoral behaviour reflected not only cultural and religious divisions but also growing regional disaffection with the central government. The PSI, like the other parties which lacked clear appeal to a single aifran, performed poorly in the election, and especially so in East and Central Java. There is no question about the close connection between socio cultural orientation and electoral behaviour, but need it have been so? And need this automatically have meant political failure for Sjahrir and the PSI? Hindsight raises some questions of relevance to assessing Sjahrir’s career: for example, the possibilities for promoting a political culture less tightly linked to aliran loyalties; alternative organizational and electoral strategies which the PSI might have pursued; the prospects of acquiring influence through better relations with other parties and political forces; and making better use of opportunities outside the framework of party and electoral politics. Conclusions about these questions must necessarily remain tentative but several themes recur in examining Sjahrir’s career which are useful in casting light on his character as a political actor, and may go some way to explaining his ultimate failure. His determined belief in rational thought and action, and his consistency in assigning a high value to educational enterprises are of primary importance, and it is also important to understand his antagonistic relations with many of his political contemporaries.
The state of the Indonesian nationalist movement both in Holland and at home at the time of Sjahrir’s Dutch sojourn has great bearing on the development of several strands of his thinking. The development of the Perhimpunan Indonesia in the 1920s and the rise of the PNI in Indonesia had brought to the surface a number of tensions within the movement, which had a common objective in independence from the Dutch, but was otherwise a motley collection of communists, democrats, reli activists, aristocratic and bureaucratic elitists. From the time of his involvement with PI in its decline, tensions with communists on the one hand and the elitists on the other would be enduring themes in Sjahrir’s politics. PI had been founded as long ago as 1908, but in the early twenties it underwent a major reorganization and a shift in its focus. Originally it had been a politically moderate association, largely a social club, for Indonesian students in the Netherlands. As the number of Indonesians proceeding to higher education in Holland grew after the first world war, the PI increasingly attracted members who had been active in youth and nationalist organizations at home. Hatta had joined it soon after his own arrival in Holland in 1921, and had quickly become the dominant force within it. Under his leadership the PI developed a distinctive nationalist program, whose elements included the supremacy of national unity over regional and sectional differences, self-help, solidarity, and most importantly, non co-operation with the Dutch authorities. Hatta believed genuine co-operation was only possible among people sharing the same rights and duties, and having common interests; otherwise, it would simply be a mask for exploitation. Active non co-operation would fulfil the dual purposes of sharpening the opposition between colonizer and colonized, and promoting the internal unity of the oppressed. Over the next two decades political leadership of the nationalist movement would be split between non co-operating nationalists, including Sukarno, Hatta and Sjahrir, and those who chose to participate in Dutch-sponsored activities, including the advisory body known as the Volksraad. Expediency motivated many co-operating nationalists, but it is worth noting that as the 1930s progressed, many were also moved by their fear of the rising tide of fascism, including the growing aggressiveness of Japan, which they saw as a more serious, or at least more urgent, problem to be overcome than European colonialism. Sjahrir would later come to share this point of view. Hatta and Sjahrir were both conscious of the domination of the Indonesian movement by elitists, predominantly Javanese, sincere in their nationalism but not committed to democratic social change or democratic methods of operation. There was considerable tension between Sjahrir and older, “opportunist” elitist nationalists; some leading figures in this tradition, such as Ali Sastroamidjojo and Subardjo, continued this antagonistic relationship right through to the events of the forties and fifties. By the twenties the Indonesian nationalist movement, and PI, included many communists. The Russian Revolution was still a recent memory, and Lenin’s anti-imperialist posture attracted many Indonesian activists to the communist cause. The Indonesian Communist Party, Asia’s oldest, impressed many PI members as the most vigorous force opposing Dutch power.’ Even those who would later espouse violent hostility to communism, like Hatta and Sjahrir, often became deeply interested in Marxist ideas. Apart from the vision and critique of society, both men were impressed by Leninist organizational principles, and both would continue to admire the efficiency of tightly disciplined cell-based organizational arrangements throughout their careers, despite their otherwise democratic outlook. But this common ground notwithstanding, there was already in the twenties a clear and growing mistrust between communists and non-communist nationalists. In the mid-twenties, Hatta had close relations with the communist leaders Semaun and Darsono, both of whom became members of PT for a time. But the relationship was never unambiguously friendly. To Hatta the alliance offered substantial organizational and propaganda benefits, but also carried the risk of harming the cause by alienating important elements in the united nationalist movement he hoped to build. Two such elements were the Sarekat Islam, some of whose leaders, such as Haji Agus Salim, had already crossed swords with the communists, and the nationalists centred around the Bandung Study Club.
However, given the urgent need to build a strong national bloc, Hatta urged nationalists to co-operate more fully with the communists. The alliance was sealed in an agreement signed by Hatta and Semaun in December 1926 providing for PI/PM co-operation, PI leadership of the nationalist movement and access to the PKI’s material resources. But within weeks the PM abandoned the pact on instructions from Moscow, where the Soviet government was growing increasingly intolerant of the refusal of Asian nationalists to submit to communist leadership. This sequence of events convinced Hatta of the communists’ inability to put the national cause ahead of their sectional (and foreign) interests. The discord intensified in 1928 when the Comintern, angered at the failure of both Chinese and Indonesian communists in preceding years, altered its strategy by eschewing co-operation with “bourgeois” nationalists. Hatta’s growing distrust was confirmed at the July 1929 congress of the International League Against Imperialism in Frankfurt, where the communists attempted to dominate proceedings.As higher educational institutions opened in Indonesia, and the Dutch government attempted to curtail student political activities, the number of Indonesians traveffing to Holland slowed dramatically after 1925; also, many of the leaders who had injected life into the PI completed their studies and went home. Furthermore the creation in 1927 of a fully-fledged nationalist party in the homeland, the PNI, drew the focus of nationalist activity away from the PI; only ever attracting minority involvement among Indonesian students, by 1928 it had declined numerically and qualitatively. Thus it had lost much of its former significance by the time Sjahrir arrived. At the same time, the PI executive had come increasingly under communist control, led by Rustam Effendi, who was a secret member of the Dutch Communist Party. Hatta now openly opposed the communists, and in this he was joined by Sjahrir, who became vice-chairman and secretaly of the PI, and took on the role, not for the last time, of Hatta’s trusted deputy. In the last days of 1929 the Dutch authorities in Java arrested hundreds of PNI members, including Sukarno, who a year later was sentenced to four years of imprisonment. Taking his and other convictions as a signal that it would no longer be tolerated, the remaining PNI leadership dissolved the party in April 1931, after the defendants lost their appeals. In its place they established the Partai Indonesia (Partindo). All this was done without reference to the mass membership. Hatta and Sjahrir had been uneasy about the mass agitational style of the PM before Sukarno’s arrest, but they were highly critical of the dissolution of the party, fearing that it was a capitulation to Dutch pressure which represented a major setback to the momentum of nationalist activity. Also, the undemocratic procedure by which the decision was made stirred their egalitarian distaste for the elitist Javanese leadership. Accordingly, they lent their support to those PNI members who wished to maintain an active non co-operating movement, difficult though that might be under the increasingly repressive conditions which the Dutch were imposing. Those members were now gathering themselves into groups known as Golongan Merdeka who hoped to form a new, secular, non co operating nationalist party which would be more democratic in tone than the PNI had been, and would move towards new organizational methods, heavily centred on education. All of this was closer to Hatta’s original conception of the nationalist movement, which had been at odds with the PNI’s elitist leadership. The PI executive, now dominated by communists, decided to expel both Sjahrir and Hatta from the organization, using their criticism of the PNI dissolution as a pretext. Sjahrir, contemptuous of the communists and appalled by the hypocrisy of their posturing in defence of the PNI leaders, resigned and claimed that he had advised Hatta to do the same. Hatta, however, was less nonchalant about losing his position, as he valued the PI more highly, and regarded it as important for establishing his leadership credentials in anticipation of his return to Indonesia. He was also hurt by the personal betrayal of former close associates.
Hatta recognized the urgency of his return to Indonesia if he was to stake his claim to leadership of the renewed movement, but he did not want to return without completing his studies. So in 1931 it was agreed that Sjahrir, whose leadership and intellectual qualities Hatta had come to admire, and with whom he felt close ideological sympathy, should return to Indonesia as his representative. Sjahrir intended to return to Holland a year or two later, but for the moment he was needed to fill the leadership gap in the nationalist movement. The trip home illustrates Sjahrir’s resourcefulness. Friends organized a passage home for him but the ticket failed to arrive in time. Sjahrir boarded the ship anyway, believing that in the event of a ticket inspection, at worst he would be forced to leave the ship at its next port of call, Genoa. On board he found himself next to a middle-aged Dutch woman who was curious that a student should be returning home in the middle of the academic year. He explained that his trip was urgently necessary as his parents were ill, and confided that he was travelling without a ticket. The woman turned out to be an official’s wife returning from home leave, and she prevailed upon her husband to pretend that Sjahrir was their servant, thus allowing him a free passage. His conscience troubled him, however, because he was afraid that his arrival was being anticipated by the Dutch secret police; fearful of causing his benefactors trouble, he disembarked at Singapore.The Golongan Merdeka held a conference to form a new party in Yogyakarta in December 1931. They chose the name Pendidikan Nasional lndonesia (“Indonesian National Education”). This seemingly odd name held three advantages. First, it signalled the group’s commitment to the educational strategy for developing the nationalist movement, implying the deep involvement of the masses in political activity, not merely as followers, but as autonomous activists. Second, by avoiding the word “partai”, there may have been some hope of reducing the hostility of the authorities, since its aims could conceivably be construed as other than political. This seems improbable in view of the group’s genesis in opposing the weakening of the non co-operation principle, and in any case such a transparent ploy could hardly have fooled the authorities. Finally, the name allowed the continued exploitation of the goodwill associated with the name “PNI”. In June of the following year the new party held its first congress in Bandung, and elected Sjahrir as its temporary chairman until Hatta returned. The group was true to the “education” idea contained in its name. Hatta had stated his intention to engage in “social pedagogy” on his return and he followed through on his promise? In contrast to the mass agitation favoured by Sukarno and Partindo, the PNI Bans emphasized the development of a cadre group of intellectual quality. To this end Hatta produced a famous document, a party manifesto called Ke Arah Indonesia Merdeka. This was followed by another document, which was a virtual catechism, consisting of 150 questions on subjects ranging from the aims of the Pendidikan to complex questions of political theory, together with prescribed answers, which were to be circulated to PNI Bans branches and to be regarded as required knowledge of members. This work is generally attributed to Hatta, and was published under his name, but both Subadio Sastrosatomo and Burhanuddin say that the idea originated with Sjahrir
After the transfer of sovereignty, Indonesia embarked on its independent life in a state of some political disorder. Under the Round Table Agreement, the country was for the moment stuck with a federal system which most politicians did not want, and with a multiplicity of parties whose future was unclear. The parties were the focus of an experiment in constitutional democracy, but their position was not yet sanctioned by a concrete act of the popular will. Elections would be held, but exactly when and under what rules was not agreed. Some parties were quite tiny, and none could be certain of future success, although Masjumi was very, confident that the demographic fact of Indonesia’s overwhelming Moslem majority would ensure its success when elections were held. The extent of Masjumi support was widely exaggerated ; in 1950, it was even reported to claim a membership as large as twenty million. Wild though some of the claims may have been, the superiority of its support to that of other parties was generally accepted. As an interim arrangement, a parliament was appointed by the President, in consultation with Hatta and party leaders. The parties were given a level of representation commensurate with their estimated level of support, taking into account also the part they had played in the independence struggle. The PSI was well rewarded for its efforts, being granted sixteen seats, making it the equal third largest party after the PNI and Masjumi. Its influence was actually even greater than this, however, because of the energy and calibre of its representatives, and because other parties were willing to make use of the party’s intellectual strength as a kind of “brains trust”.
The PSI entered the new era in a state of organizational weakness. Its membership was no more than a few thousand spread throughout the country, loosely organized and in some cases still reeling from the confusion of the split with Amir’s socialists. Thus organization was clearly a major priority. This was in any case consistent with Sjahrir’s long-held belief in the importance of the organizational task. This issue raises a fundamental dilemma confronting Sjahrir, how to reconcile a democratic temperament with the discipline required of a tight organizational structure. Other parties also turned their attention to organization, and most tried to recruit a large mass membership. The PSI, however, adopted a dual strategy of attempting to maximize its short-term influence by manipulation of the political elite, while basing its long-term development plans on cultivating a cohesive and well- educated membership, reflecting quality rather than quantity. Hence the party at first devoted relatively little effort to developing a large following among the general public or a local-level organizational machine. This reflected Sjahrir’s preference for taking the long view of events, and his experience. In the PNI Baru of the 1930s Hatta and Sjahrir had built a movement which emphasized quality and political education in its members, and this had given the organization the resilience to continue through the thirties, albeit in attenuated form, despite considerable repression. Drawing on his experiences under the Dutch and Japanese, Sjahrir felt that the most basic protection for the party against any prospective totalitarian menace was a solid core of politically well-educated cadres. At the same time, it must be recognized that in this case the protection may contain the seed of the disease. But nonetheless, it was his firm view. In the thirties he had written : A mass party does not mean that all the tens of millions of Kromos and Marhaens must enter as members of the party to be a real mass party.A party is a mass party if it is based on the importance of the mass and interprets the masses.’ He had reiterated this idea in Perjuangan Kita in 1945 : Its membership need not be large, provided that it forms a tight disciplined army, efficient and modern in organization and armed with a powerful and developed ideology and wide general knowledge.
This emphasis on cadre-building and education implied a rather exclusive attitude to recruitment, and a resistance to mass participation, again a retreat from democratic purity. By the time the PSI began its serious organizational effort, there were additional strong reasons to follow this line. The split with the Amir socialists had indicated the danger of a party lacking internal coherence, and there was also a fear of communist infiltration, especially while the party was numerically weak. This exclusiveness was reflected in the careful screening of recruits; new members had to be nominated by two existing members, and in line with Sjahrir’s pedagogic style, had to pass a test on political theory.’ Also, the party maintained two categories of membership, full and candidate. Less than twenty per cent of PSI members attained the more advanced status. The party proclaimed that it was not against having a large membership in principle, but not until the organizational work necessaiy to ensure the party’s strength was completed. Originally it was intended to maintain the barriers to new members only as a temporary measure, to be reviewed in two years : the terms of admission...would be relaxed. It would then be possible to proceed to the second phase in which the party would have to work as a popular organization, or as a mass party In practice, however, the party was very slow to implement the “second phase”, partly for fear of communist infiltrators, but mainly because the party’s preferred strategy simply did not require such a development. Sjahrir was especially concerned that the top leadership of the party should reflect quality in intellect and experience. The PSI’s leadership was certainly of a high calibre. Apart from Sjahrir, who held the position of party chairman, the party’s Politburo included: Djohan Sjahroezah, Sjahrir’s nephew and long time political associate, who was general secretary; L.M. Sitorus, head of the organization section; and Subadio Sastrosatomo, leader of the PSI’s parliamentary fraction. Other important figures included the financial expert Dr Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, and Soedjatmoko, one of Indonesia most highly regarded intellectual figures (and also Sjahrir’s brother-in- law), who was an important influence even though he did not formally join the party until returning from overseas travel in 1955. Although the PSI has generally been seen as hostile to Javanese traditionalism it is worth noting that many of its leading figures - Soedjatmoko, Sumitro, Subadio, Wijono - were Javanese. The quality of the leadership group is sufficient to demonstrate that the PSI was not merely a vehicle for Sjahrir, but he was the unquestioned dominant figure in it. His centrality is even more apparent when one considers that most of the other leaders were drawn from the group of younger activists whom Sjahrir had nurtured during the occupation. One of Sjahrir’s deepest concerns was to resist the totalitarian potential he had discerned in the nationalist movement, and in the Communist Party. As noted earlier, however, he was impressed at an early age with the virtues of Lenin’s organizational principles. Therefore his democratic, anti-totalitarian party somewhat ironically adopted an organizational structure which in many ways resembled the arrangements normally favoured by communist parties, an irony not lost on Sjahrir himself. In principle, authority in the party lay with the party congress, but this body only ever met twice, in 1952 and shortly before the 1955 elections. Between congresses the party was subject to the authority of a plenary party council, which was also the Central Committee. This body had fifty-one members, and was thus too unwieldy to meet on a regular basis, so in practice policy was in the hands of the Politburo of four members mentioned above. The day to day administration was in the hands of a two-member Executive Committee, namely Sjahrir and Djohan Sjahroezah. The party’s central activities were handled by a secretariat with five departments: general affairs, organization, finance, foreign affairs and education, information and publications. Reflecting Sjahrir’s stress on education, the activities of the organization department were closely co-ordinated with the education and information department. Thus the party’s development of membership was tightly linked to a cadre training program for which the education department developed courses. The PSI program aimed to achieve a socialist society by democratic means, that is, not by violence. By this time the refinement of his attitude to Marxist orthodoxy which Sjahrir had begun in the thirties had progressed to a social democratic position which rejected the notion of class struggle, on several grounds. He believed that class analysis was inapplicable to Indonesia since the country lacked an indigenous bourgeoisie, hence there was no one to struggle against within the Indonesian state, which in any case needed to preserve its still fragile national unity. Also, he adopted the social democratic view that economic and technological conditions had changed the conditions of life under capitalism to make class struggle obsolete. Finally he felt that class struggle ran counter to humanitarian principles. This was all rather different in tone from Sjahrir’s concern in the early thirties for “the emancipation of the Indonesian people, that is, of the millions of landless who do not aspire to be capitalists, of the farmers, labourers, Kromos and Marhaens”. In the first instance social progress required development of the economy’s productive capacity through rational economic management: “calculation and planning”, using “technology science and organization”. Only after increasing production could “underdeveloped” countries like Indonesia turn their attention to the problem of distributive justice. In order to implement its program the PSI aspired to power, but rejected the notion of taking it by force, though with an important reservation. Sjahrir expressly reserved the right to revolt if ”faced with a totalitarian, feudal, absolutist or arbitrary state”. He had concerns about threats to political freedom from both right and left: Sukarno and the elitist leaders of the PNI were untrustworthy, and the PKI posed a major challenge. His greatest fear was that they might act in concert.
Sjahrir, more than most Indonesian politicians, saw the Cold War and communism as central issues in Indonesian politics. His analysis of the Indonesian party system turned on this point. He advanced a threefold classification: the PKI and its mass organizations; those who opposed them (the PSI and the religious parties); and those who were not necessarily sympathetic to the communists but who failed to understand the need as he saw it to oppose them. This last group included the President and the PNI. In Sjahrir’s view this group hid their lack of program and principle behind a mask of nationalist unity: This group claims to appreciate the Communists’...power to influence and stir the masses.... This group is also of the opinion that all ideological differences should be avoided, including differences with the Communists. ...this group has never clearly expressed its views on socialism. For them it is sufficient to proclaim themselves as anti- imperialists, and as good nationalists... For the same reasons, they refrain from expressing their views on Communism of the Cominform variety, or on Communism in general. Sjahrir viewed a government as losing legitimacy if it did not measure up to standards in human rights and political freedoms. This was a matter of principle but also of self-interest, since the socialists maintained a rationalistic self-confidence that their political program, if effectively taught, would inevitably succeed unless interdicted by repressive force. In the short term, at least, aspiration to power was principally a question of obtaining influence rather than office, however. Socialist tactics in the fifties were strongly oriented towards exerting influence through state agencies, the army and alliances with other political parties, especially Masjumi. Hence, although seeing itself as democratic, the PSI was not necessarily wholly committed to the formal processes of Indonesia’s constitutional democracy, i.e., the electoral process and parliamentary government, especially if these processes were unfavourable to the party’s own interests. This was true even in the early fifties, when the PSI enjoyed a comparatively strong parliamentary influence. During this time the PSI and its close allies worked hard to take advantage of extra-parliamentary opportunities to exert power and influence. However, these efforts were not always successful. This was apparent in the events surrounding the attempted coup of October 17, 1952.
The Indonesian army of the early fifties was badly affected by disunity, as much of its officer corps had formed alignments with one or other of the political groups in the country. The Wilopo cabinet, which governed in 1952-53, was a coalition dominated by the PNI (especially its more socialist-inclined wing led by Wilopo himself), Masjumi and the PSI.’ The cabinet and the army leadership wished to rationalize the army, and targeted in particular units formed from the Japanese-trained military organizations of the occupation period, which were strongest in Central Java and had strong links with Sukarno and the PNI, to whom they now looked for support in opposing the reform. The army reform can in a sense be seen as a PSI project, in that its key proponents were all PSI sympathizers: Major General T.B. Simatupang, chief of staff of the armed forces; the Sultan of Yogyakarta, minister of defence; and All Budiardjo, secretary-general of the ministry of defence.In September there were rumours of a planned military coup, and the PKI alleged PSI connivance. Both the Sultan and PSI parliamentary leader Subadio denied this, but the party clearly sympathized with the army leaders and, in an effort to solidify this relationship, it campaigned against the influence of parliament.’ Democratic principles notwithstanding, the PSI was pleased at the prospect of a coup, as they hoped to exercise greater influence through, or in co-operation with, the military authorities than they could through parliament. Meanwhile, Colonel Nasution, the army chief of staff, had proposed the dissolution of the parliament, and held discussions to this effect with the president and vice-president, which were inconclusive. On October 16, parliament passed a no confidence motion in the cabinet over the army reform plan, with most PNI members opposing Wilopo, even though he was from their party. Next morning, troops filled Medan Merdeka and demonstrators demanded that parliament be dissolved. Nasution and other officers met Sukarno to press this demand but he refused to intervene and the attempt to remove the authority of parliament collapsed. The incident had important consequences for the PSI, almost all negative, and in retrospect it can be seen as a disastrous turning point for the party. First, many of its leading sympathizers lost their positions: the Sultan had to resign when the cabinet refused to punish army officers who defied their leaders, and Nasution was temporarily replaced by a Japanese-trained officer. Over the next few years others, including Simatupang, also lost their positions. Wilopo’s failure severely damaged his prestige in the PNI, and henceforth that party was much more heavily influenced by its elitist leaders, with whom Sjahrir had had mutually antagonistic relations for many years. The incident did nothing to enhance the prestige of either parliament or the army, and also crystallized the divisions within the army; hence the position of Sukarno, with whom the PSI had minimal influence, was strengthened. The army’s disunity also destroyed the PSI’s hopes of gaining a position in or close to a prospective military government. More broadly, the incident made clearer the deepening political hostility between those forces based primarily in east and central Java and those based elsewhere. Perhaps most importantly for the PSI, the affair reminded parliament of the hollowness of its authority in the absence of elections; within six months, the desire to overcome this handicap had moved the legislators to pass the electoral act. For Sjahrir and his party, time was running out before they would have to test their support in the public arena. Wilopo’s government had lost its vitality, but held on until July 1953 when Ali Sastroamidjojo became Prime Minister. His two years in office were catastrophic for Sjahrir and the PSI. The Ali cabinet was made up of PNI, NU, minor party and non party ministers; the PSI and Masjumi now adopted an overtly oppositional stance. The growing polarization of politics was reflected in the exclusion of Masjumi and PSI representatives from the central electoral committee, which subsequently made many rulings which favoured the other parties. More damaging, however, was the fact that the PSI continued to gather numerical strength only slowly during this period. Many in the party were privately unenthusiastic about the elections even though the party publicly supported them. Meanwhile the other major parties worked assiduously to build their membership and support, and the PSI’s bitterest enemy, the Communist Party, was especially successful in this. For two years after the Madiun disaster, the Communist Party had continued to be racked by internal dissension and by 1951 it could still only boast 10,000 members; within four years they increased this to half a million, and by February 1956, a miIlion.
Like the PSI, the PKI was concerned to maintain party coherence, but they achieved outstanding success in avoiding the exclusiveness of the PSI recruiting system by using a third category of membership, that of the “supporter member".One factor in the PSI’s half-hearted approach to recruitment was its trust in Masjumi’s prospects of success. The Masjumi faction led by Sukiman, which was based in Java and was culturally conservative, did not have good relations with the PSI, and the PSI did not participate in Sukiman’s cabinet. But after the Masjumi congress of 1952, at which Mohammad Natsir became party chairman, the PSI had grown increasingly close to the Moslem party, which had always been regarded as the likely dominant party in an elected parliament. The PSI had good grounds for believing that a Masjumi-based government with a solid basis of support in the parliament would prove receptive to the PSI’s policy direction, as long as the PSI could at least attain a respectable degree of support. The election demonstrated that the belief in Masjumi dominance was, however, misplaced; so too was any hope of the PSI itself achieving a good result without devoting more of its energies to acquiring a mass following. Just a few months before the elections, Ali’s cabinet fell; once again, trouble in the army sparked the government’s demise. But this time the army leadership was opposed to the government of the day, and this time the army leaders prevailed. With the retirement of the temporary chief of staff who had replaced Nasution in 1952, the government tried to install Bambang Utoyo, a strong PNI supporter. The army simply refused to accept the appointment and a crisis of authority ensued. Ultimately the army leaders won the day, the cabinet was forced to resign, and later Nasution regained his old position.
The incident affected the PSI in two ways. Immediately, it now joined Masjumi and other friendly forces in a new cabinet under Burhanuddin Harahap. In the long term, the affair signalled the beginning of a new unity in the military, and increased its capacity to act independently of its dealings with other political elements, thus creating an important new force in national politics. There was some feeling in the new government that the opportunity should now be taken to postpone the elections, but it was clear that some elements of the government as well as the opposition would not stand for such a course, so the election date was left unchanged. The central electoral committee’s membership was adjusted, however, to include Masjumi and PSI members. The PSI held its second party congress in early June 1955 as a central feature of its election campaign. The congress exhibited an optimistic mood and was well-attended. The opening ceremony was held before an overflow crowd in Jakarta’s main sports stadium, and President Sukarno was even invited to attend, which he could not refuse as he was theoretically above party politics, despite being closely identified with the PNI. Sjahrir’s closing speech in the city’s main square a week later also attracted one of the biggest crowds ever seen there. The congress disguised the reality of the PSI’s weakness in the countryside; it was one thing to attract a large and enthusiastic crowd in Jakarta, quite another to secure the votes of millions of peasant farmers whose lives were barely touched by modern communications. If the PSI’s work throughout the early fifties had been a great “game of political bluff’ as Myers believes, then the party congress was certainly its zenith. Through August and September Sjahrir led the campaign with a speaking tour which took him to Sulawesi, Kalimantan, Sumatra, Java and Bali, but only to major towns; the party still had little contact with rural voters. His main theme was popular dissatisfaction with government and falling living standards; in his home town of Medan, Sjahrir rode from the airport to the city in a becak to contrast with the “limousine lifestyle” of rival politicians. Polling proceeded fairly smoothly on September 29, and the PSI’s failure was quickly apparent. Nationwide its vote was only two per cent, eighth in overall terms.
Only in Bali, where there was hostility towards Javanese traditionalism but none of the religious parties had any significant following (there was no Hindu party) did the party figure as a major vote-winner. As expected Masjumi and the PNI polled fairly well, but especially startling was the similar success of Nahdatul Ulama and the Communist Party. The PSI’s hopes of wielding influence on a Masjumi government proved vain. Masjumi gathered over 20 per cent of the vote; it was the second largest party, and the only party to gain an absolute majority of votes in any province. But its hopes of a clear victory proved unfounded; secular parties proved more attractive to Javanese voters, and other Islamic parties were able to exceed Masjumi’s vote. The PSI’s disappointment was profound and various analyses were conducted, from which several themes emerged. The reaction focused on two areas: the weaknesses of the party and criticism of the parliamentary system. Some of the party’s shortcomings were material. Organization was weak generally, and especially in the populous provinces of East and Central Java; it simply lacked the apparatus for village-level vote gathering which the other parties enjoyed. Its fund-raising had also been poor compared to the large parties. The PNI had corruptly used government funds during the Ali government’s term to boost its finances, while the Moslem parties had been able to have donations to their cause regarded as fit payments of the zakat, the obligatory religious contribution. The PSI had employed “honest” methods, and many of its campaigners had lacked militancy, and had thus been unable to demonstrate the kind of conviction needed to show the party’s sense of purpose. Also, Sitorus revealed that the party had underestimated the voter turnout in rural areas, and overestimated the level of city participation. In Sjahrir’s opinion, however, the PSI’s greatest weakness lay in its miscalculation of the political maturity of the electorate, especially the degree to which they could still be dominated by religious and civil authority. Far from his focus on educational techniques having caused the failure, the problem lay in their insufficient vigour.
He called on the leadership of the PSI and Masjumi to show cause why they should not be prohibited. Sjahrir and Subadio, together with their Masjumi counterparts, were compelled to endure not one, but two formal ceremonies where the president. Two parties were dissolved. In 1961 an attempt was made to assassinate Sukarno while he was visiting Makassar. Sukarno came to believe, wrongly, that the attempt was part of a conspiracy against him which he associated with various opposition politicians who had recently gathered in Bali, to attend to funeral of the father of Anak Agung, the former foreign minister. The group included Sjahrir, Subadio, Mohamad Roem and Sultan Hamid of Pontianak. In January 1962, these leaders, together with Anak Agung himself and Masjumi’s Prawoto, were arrested on Sukarno’s orders.The conditions of their confinement were comparatively comfortable, but for Sjahrir, this imprisonment was very trying, because of his declining health, but especially because of the loss of family life. At his funeral Hatta observed that Sjahrir “had trained himself to withstand all manner of suffering, but not separation from his wife and children.” For the first two months, Sjahrir was kept in an ordinary house in the suburbs of Jakarta, then under military guard for nearly a year in the old prison of Madiun, where the six politicians were the sole occupants. Roem’s account gives the impression of a subdued and somewhat solitary man, a far cry from the gregariousness which had marked most of Sjahrir’s life. At the end of the year his blood pressure was so high that he had to be moved to a military hospital in Jakarta for treatment. He remained there for eight months, and was then confined to a house near the centre of Jakarta. In February 1965 he was moved without explanation to the Military Detention Centre, an old and unsanitary prison. He was kept in a damp room and was not permitted to receive any food from outside. Within a few weeks he suffered two strokes. A fellow prisoner curious to see the face of his famous fellow inmate went to his room one night and found him lying on the bathroom floor. He was not allowed medical treatment until the next morning. An operation at the army hospital proved unsuccessful, and his family successfully pressed the government to let him travel, with his wife Poppy and their two children, to Switzerland for treatment. He never recovered from his illness, and he died far from home on April 9, 1966. After the 1965 coup attempt, which ultimately brought General Suharto to power, the PSI leaders were politically rehabilitated, but the party itself did not revive. The positive, rational approach to the nation’s economic development which the PSI had advocated found favour with the new regime, and some of the party’s many talented leaders were given the opportunity to serve in high positions: Soedjatmoko became Ambassador to the United States, and Dr Sumitro entered the cabinet. But as a distinctive ideology and a self-sufficient political movement democratic socialism in Indonesia ended with the death of the PSI.
Tak ada terik pada siang itu-sebuah hari dalam musim gugur, September 1921. Angin dingin menelusup lewat sela-sela kancing jas seorang pemuda yang berdiri dengan pikiran berkecamuk di satu sudut Rotterdam. Pemuda berusia 19 tahun itu bernama Mohammad Hatta. Sebagai mahasiswa baru di Rotterdamse Handelshogeschool-sebuah sekolah ekonomi bergengsi-ia mesti membeli sejumlah buku. Tapi dana beasiswa belum diterimanya. Uang saku yang dibawanya dari kampung tak seberapa. Baru sepekan dia tiba di Belanda-negeri yang 8.000 mil, dari Bukit Tinggi, tempat ia lahir dan dibesarkan. Tanpa uang di saku, ia mendekati rak buku besar di De Westerboekhandel, sebuah toko buku tua di kota itu. Ia mengambil Hartley Withers, Schar, dan beberapa buku karangan T.M.C. Asser. Ia tak tahu dengan apa semua buku itu harus dibayar. Beruntung, pemilik toko buku itu tahu bagaimana harus bersikap pada mahasiswa miskin dari Dunia Ketiga.
