Managing Politics and Islam in Indonesia

MANAGING POLITICS AND ISLAM IN INDONESIA 153CONCLUSIONMuslim interests were brought into state structures that served as mechanismsfor the regulation of relations between intermediate elite groups and the upperreachesof power; specifically President Suharto’s regime. One of the mainfunctions of incorporation, as discussed in this chapter, was to regulate theaccess of these groups to patronage and power opportunities, which resulted notonly in winners and losers but supplied one of the arenas in which struggles forposition and power took place. This study has shown howcorporatist organisations (Golkar and ICMI) can serve authoritarian strategies ofdivide-and-rule with the aim of maintaining an imbalance of competing interests.Thus, the analysis considered how the corporatist organisations were subject tothe interplay of patron-client networks and to intra-elite competition, in whichSuharto was the senior patron and final arbiter of dispute. Consequently, conflictoccurred between newly incorporated interests (in ICMI), which were seekingaccess to political power and career advancement, and rival interests (militaryleaders and state bureaucrats). Some of the rivals had been sidelined or excludedfrom power arrangements by the rise of the new groups.However, incorporation in ICMI also failed to translate into real positions ofpower for its intelligentsia. Suharto had continued to maintain a balance ofcompeting interests in the political institutions as a means of preserving regimeintegrity and personal power. The president’s reliance on tactics of divide-andrule,to date, had continued to serve him well by keeping possible rival centres ofpower, or patron-client networks, in a constant state of mutual struggle. It was notnecessary for Suharto to orchestrate the contests for power; it was sufficient thathe presided over them and cultivated competing interests in a manner that wouldreinforce his own role as supreme leader of Indonesian politics. In conclusion,incorporated Muslim interests helped Suharto maintain a shifting disequilibriumof forces as they contended for political predominance at the time of growingpublic perceptions of an impending succession crisis.Insofar as conflict reinforced Suharto’s dominance over Indonesian politics,and remained within predictable limits by not threatening to spark society-wideconflagrations, it can be assumed that intra-elite rivalry was not an undesiredconsequence of state management strategies. However, the state-Islamicaccommodation, coinciding as it did with a period of political openness, hadstimulated rising political aspirations on the part of the Muslim intelligentsia.Consequently, Muslim interests in ICMI were showing early signs of movingbeyond their corporatist containment by formulating their own private agendas.Chapter eight examines the expansion of organised societal interests that, as aresult of intra-elite conflict and the changing composition of Indonesian society,were unleashed by a period of political openness.