Is Indonesia a Democracy?

Democracy is a very difficult term. A simple definition of democracy is ‘the government by the people, of the people, and for the people’. An even simpler definition of democracy is ‘the rule of the majority’. Using these definitions, it seems almost certain that Indonesia is a functioning democracy. After all, it has all the mechanisms to ensure that the voice of the majority will be heard in (and influence) decision-making process. Election is one; clear separation and distribution of power is another. Maybe we can also add mass protest as one existing mechanism of democracy - by that definition - in Indonesia.

However, I do not think that democracy is only about the will of the majority. Many social movements in history – the seeds of democracy – concerned themselves about giving voice to the voiceless. Thus the first labor movement concerned themselves of giving rights to laborers who previously did not have rights, and the original women suffrage movement struggled to give women the rights that they previously did not enjoy, and so on. These movements and struggles would later on influence the way democracy is supposed to be done. They provide the contemporary democracy with one additional important defining characteristic: true democracy protects the rights of everyone and extends it even to anyone who was not protected before, regardless whether they are part of the majority or not.

From this point of view then we can start to question whether Indonesia is a truly functioning democracy or not. Because it seems that democracy in Indonesia only works in the first sense: to obey the rule of the majority, but it stutters when it wants to enter the next level of democracy: the protection of everyone’s rights, which includes minorities and the disenfranchised (religious minorities, persons with disabilities, homosexuals, etc).  Cases of religious intolerance, lack of access of persons with disabilities, violence towards homosexuals, and others, seem to highlight this reality of Indonesia’s democracy.  Before we can give protection and guarantee the rights of these groups, I think it is still a long way to go before we can safely say that we are a democratic country.

Yet I do think that Indonesia still has some hopes. For one thing, change is brewing. Economy is improving, and with that comes a better connection to (and understanding of) the outside world and, at the same time, of our inner self. People are beginning to challenge old and outdated beliefs, and are more willing to be a little bit more tolerant to differences in taste, in style, in preference, in opinion, and in political beliefs.  Indonesia has a long history of tolerance (although at the same time it has a long history of intolerance as well), and we can dig and focus on these long traditions to be used as a foundation to extend and expand human rights protection. To extend means to give rights protection to more groups, to expand means to enlarge the scope of rights we are currently enjoying. When this happens, then we can proudly say that Indonesia is a democratic country.