The Perantau

Right-Wing Narratives:

A Reassessment of Digital Media Usage in Indonesian Civil Society

The majority of existing scholarly literature on the use of digital media by civil society and civil society organisations [CSOs] has focused much on celebrating progressive and left-leaning social movements whilst critically analysing how they use social media to achieve their aims (Castells 2015; Hall, Schmitz & Dedmon 2020; Heimans & Timms 2018; Scaramuzzino, G & Scaramuzzino, R 2017). Schradie (2019), however, finds that conservative CSOs, in fact, utilise digital media more than their liberal counterparts. Schradie’s (2019) understanding of ‘conservative’ is that they were ideologically nationalist, populist and neoliberal, where even within this political ideology there were many nuances and differences in between.

This essay will redefine what constitutes right-wing politics and their use of digital media within the specific context of Indonesia, where politics are not as binary as Schradie’s (2019) pretext of U.S. politics as distinctively different social issues and external factors come into play (Harney & Olivia 2003).

This essay will, in particular, look at digital media usage within the contexts of: a) religious, or rather, Islamic, fundamentalism with reference to the Islamic Defenders Front [Front Pembela Islam, FPI]; and b) nationalist sentiment with reference to Pemuda Pancasila [Pancasila Youth].

Conceptual Framework and the Indonesian Sociocultural Context

This essay leans heavily on Schradie’s (2019) work The Revolution that Wasn’t, where she discusses how conservative civil society organisations utilise the internet and social media much more than their more liberal counterparts. This is in opposition to more mainstream claims that digital media is more prominently used by left-wing civil society organisations. Notably, Hall, Schmitz and Dedmon (2020) discuss how digitally-enabled distributed campaigning creates more pathways for collective action to achieve more democratic, egalitarian ideals. This research is echoed by other scholars in the field such as but not limited to Castells (2015), Heimans and Timms (2018), and G Scaramuzzino and R Scaramuzzino (2017). Schradie’s work, however, also draws parallels with the behaviour of conservative CSOs in other states, such as with Tektaş and Keysan’s (2021) research on conservative CSOs in Croatia, Slovakia and Poland. As this essay will focus more on the CSO environment in Indonesia, the focus of scholarly research will also revolve around key issues in the country.

It is not straightforward to trace the history of civil society in Indonesia, considering its history of repression during the authoritarian New Order regime between 1966 to 1998, led by political strongman Soeharto. Against the backdrop of the fall of the authoritarian regime, then, Harney and Olivia (2003) discuss that in the post-Soeharto era, socially progressive activists, who were for a long time considered political dissenters and enemies of the state, were able to establish CSOs that were mostly trade unions, labour organisations and women rights groups, all of which were banned or heavily restricted and controlled prior to 1998. Given that youth and student protests in the capital, amidst the Asian Economic Crisis, formed part of the tipping point of the fall of the authoritarian regime, Indonesian CSOs were focused on providing socio-economic security at a time when the state was weak and ineffective (Harney & Olivia 2003). Much discourse on Indonesian civil society, however, forgets those who stand in opposition to the socially progressive, most of which represent anti-communist, religious extremist, and/or ultranationalist sentiment (Harney & Olivia 2003). The preman were the disciplinary front line for the Soeharto regime, which Harney and Olivia (2003) likened to the ‘foot soldiers’ of the Mafia. Lindsey (2006) discusses that the preman was protected by state officials and used violence, terror and intimidation to carry out rackets and extortion, but most importantly, to uphold the authority of the government and political and business elite, given that they were often associated with and indirectly employed by this ruling class. The New Order regime established a strong culture where coercion and violence were one of the most effective political tools against one’s opponents (Hefner 2005). Throughout Indonesia, the preman operated locally under the supervision of military officials in Jakarta and Medan in 1965, which grew to become one of Indonesia’s most powerful paramilitaries, the Pemuda Pancasila (Hefner 2005). Hybrid political paramilitaries became widespread and commonplace by the late 1990s, whereas now that hybridity expanded to those of the “radical Islamist bent”, paving the way for the FPI to “quickly become the largest of these Islamist paramilitaries” (Hefner 2005). As the strongman effect fell away in the post-Soeharto era, the State lost control over the preman and paramilitaries, where they now operate as ‘privatised’ CSOs who to an extent continue to do what they once did for the State, albeit now in an autonomous zone of civil society (Harney & Olivia 2003; Lindsey 2006). With their interlinked history of ‘turf wars’ and fighting for power after Soeharto (Hefner 2005), the FPI and Pancasila Youth represent the two ideologies that characterise conservative CSOs of contemporary Indonesia.

The Islamic Defenders Front and Religious Fundamentalism

The Islamic Defenders Front is infamous as a representation of Islam’s far-right radical camp in the Indonesian context, which insists on the implementation of Islamic law and an Indonesian society steered by Islamic supremacy (Duile 2017). Established in 1998 as a collective of paramilitary troops, preman and pious Muslims, the FPI further their agenda “by establishing a hegemony of reactionary Islamic discourses through cooperation with Islamic politicians, raids against behaviour and symbolism considered anti-Islamic, as well as through agitation in social media and on the streets” (Duile 2017, p.253). Structurally, it resembles military ranks, with the frontline ‘fighters’ [laskar] tasked to intimidate and make threats upon their targets, which include leftist discussions and events – given fears of growing sentiment for secularism and atheism, communism and LGBT rights – and physical locations that may condone sinful acts, such as nightclubs and alcohol- and/or pork-serving venues (Duile 2017). This bottom-up approach to Islamisation stems from the subjugation of Islamic political forces during the Soeharto era, and subsequent democratisation in the post-Soeharto era, as during this time Islam was only confined to the private and ostracised from the political (Abdullah & Osman 2018). The downfall of the New Order regime, however, also brought with it the liberalisation, and arguably Western imperialisation, of the Indonesian media (Abdullah & Osman 2018). There was a moral panic among many Muslim organisations and activists, which saw the introduction of a Western hedonistic lifestyle as detrimental to the Indonesian, or at least Muslim, identity (Abdullah & Osman 2018). However, liberalised media allowed Indonesian Muslims to also participate in media discourse, which by popularising Islamic cultural iconography and glamorising the Islamic lifestyle, “Indonesian Muslims provided a counter-narrative to foreign media and reclaimed their control over media production and consumption” (Abdullah & Osman 2018, p. 217). Electronic media became a new area of contestation of Islamic identity politics, which in the present day pushes Islamic organisations and actors to challenge this space in an era of increasing globalisation. Thus, this section discusses how the FPI uses social media to instigate Islamic mobilisation in the private and political spheres.

Buzzers, the popular Indonesian term for the engine behind political social media influencers, are crucial for the FPI, tasked with making their social media posts go viral by creating that ‘buzz’ around certain issues (Seto 2019). The now-exiled FPI leader Rizieq Shihab, for example, is the face and authoritative figure of the organisation, in which the buzzer’s role is to ensure that his messages and Islamic preachings circulate and thrive in online public discourse (Seto 2019). Their responsibilities are straightforward: each buzzer uses multiple accounts to like and share the FPI’s social media posts, using template comments and memes to fuel conversation and manufacture high engagement (Seto 2019). In Seto’s (2019) fieldwork on Islamist buzzers and the FPI, an interviewee claims to hold staff membership, voluntarily being a part of the FPI’s Media Team, and works with his counterparts in other neighbouring districts to coordinate social media engagement and other strategies. The Media Team often circulates videos of popular yet controversial Islamic preachers, although because of its usually derogatory language and violent messages, their content is taken down by the various platforms’ censorship guidelines (Seto 2019). To circumvent this, the FPI’s buzzer team will keep uploading the same content but under different titles, different times and occasions, making sure that the same video will always be available online (Seto 2019). As they take turns to monitor their content in the event it is taken down, they also spread that content across other more direct platforms, such as WhatsApp and Telegram, both of which are constructed as chat groups and enables more engagement with FPI content (Seto 2019). These efforts, however, even extend beyond the members of the Media Team, who on occasion would ask their non-FPI peers for help in reviving broken weblinks to their content (Seto 2019). Being completely voluntary, they attribute their eagerness for this line of work as a materialisation of their spiritual call, performing solidarity under a common religious identity and spreading information to like-minded people (Seto 2019). In institutionalising digital media work and fueling the desire for religious solidarity, the FPI is able to capture the attention of its followers and, more importantly, sustain it.

The intensive, constant and effective use of digital media bears fruit, having materialised through the FPI becoming a key actor in Indonesian politics and even able to influence the tide of political elections. In the lead-up to the 2017 Jakarta gubernatorial elections, the non-Muslim ethnic-Chinese incumbent-governor Ahok faced charges of blasphemy after making references to the Quran during his re-election campaign in late 2016 (Duile 2017). The FPI has already publicly denounced his leadership on social media during his tenure, but with this, they saw the opportunity to fuel their smear campaign by organising public protests both online and offline (Duile 2017). In the time between Ahok’s statement and the election in February, the FPI played a leading role in gathering hundreds of thousands of people in central Jakarta on 2 December 2016 to protest against Ahok and to increase pressure on the court, contending to be one of the largest mass protests in Indonesian history (Duile 2017). The online circulation of memes became a cornerstone of FPI activity in and around the protests and the Ahok incident (Duile 2017). Incorporating nationalistic symbols and language, and in particular connecting the issues of blasphemy and nationalism, the FPI managed to mobilise strong emotions online from the public (Duile 2017). The year after in 2018, leading up to the 2019 Indonesian presidential elections, the FPI continued this annual tradition of mass gatherings on 2 December, which they promptly named the ‘212 Reunion’ (Harkan & Irwansyah 2019). By utilising Twitter to create a virtual community to share and consume information, Harkan and Irwansyah (2019) found that presidential candidate Prabowo Subianto was among the central actors in the Twitter network, being the most mentioned user in the study. Although the FPI claimed that the 212 Reunion in 2018 was not politically driven, which to an extent is supported by Harkan and Irwansyah’s (2019) data as political messages constituted less than 30% of the 1000-tweet corpus, Prabowo was actually invited to the rally and encouraged to give a speech to the masses, whereas the then-candidate now-president Joko Widodo was not. The FPI wields great power to mobilise the masses, whereby their efforts in maintaining a strong social network and presence in the digital space were key factors that made their use of religious-fundamentalist language incredibly effective.

The Pancasila Youth and the Ultra-nationalistic Identity

The Pancasila Youth are an ultra-nationalist paramilitary CSO that vows to defend the state ideology Pancasila and a return to the 1945 Constitution, which they have done consistently since their inception in 1959, as opposed to other youth groups at the time that defended communism and liberal ideas (Ryter 1998). In its literal definition, pemuda translates to ‘youth’, however in the Indonesian context, it often connotes activism and how the youth are harbingers of change (Parker & Nilan 2013), as Harney and Olivia (2003) and Fener (2005) partially discuss how central youth activism was as Indonesia’s revolutionary force. As Ryter (1998, p. 47) summarises,

“… the emergence and rise to prominence of Pemuda Pancasila during the late Suharto era is a consequence of the need … to transform a revolutionary nationalism of ‘pemuda’ (youth) of the post-independence period into a nationalism expressed through loyalty to the (personalized) state itself.”

Although the Pancasila Youth are often associated as low-life thugs, they insist that they embrace the preman not for criminal purposes, but as representatives of the underprivileged and disenfranchised “to raise their nationalist consciousness and return them to society” (Ryter 1998, p. 47). This section will discuss how the Pancasila Youth operate in contemporary Indonesia and the extent to which they use digital media to spread their cause.

One of the Pancasila Youth’s main priorities of digital media use is in image building and highlighting their ‘good’ side as a reactive solution to the usually negative coverage by the Indonesian media (Pardede & Putri 2019). Pardede and Putri (2019) uses the example of how footage of a turf war between the Pancasila Youth and another local right-wing CSO called the Forum Betawi Rempug [FBR; the United Betawi Forum] went viral in 2018, to which representatives of the the Pancasila Youth responded as detrimental to their ‘good image’. According to Pardede and Putri’s (2019) interview with one of the organisation’s members, the Pancasila Youth’s social media and communication strategy aims to utilise the fact that they have chapters and sub-branches in nearly every region of the country, making it appropriate to use digital media to: a) create opportunities for members to work together; b) work more closely with provincial governments; and c) promote and organise social activities. All members of the organisation are considered ‘communicators’, responsible to spread the good name of the Pancasila Youth (Pardede & Putri 2019). Lasmanto and Imran (2021) echoes this in their research on one of the Pancasila Youth’s branches, where through an informant they concluded that in the Bogor Regency in particular, their branch primarily used Instagram to spread information, though central to that is social media’s ability to facilitate direct responses and feedback from their followers. Their focus was mostly concerned in bringing their online presence offline, with an emphasis on participating in the community and be on alert in case of, for example, a natural disaster, in which Lasmanto and Imran (2021) uses the example of how they assisted in socialising COVID-19 protocols and relaying other health-related information. It is clear, then, that the Pancasila Youth’s social media strategy places great emphasis on reclaiming their negative image and turning it into something more positive.

Although their strategy has proven somewhat successful in terms of image building, it does not, however, assist in mobilising the masses for political gain the way the FPI has done. They may influence regional governmental elections but social media is absent from this line of Pancasila Youth activity. Instead, it mirrors Schradie’s (2019) discussion on how some conservative CSOs in her sample study resorted more to spreading offline prints and media during rallies and such to mobilise support. Given their long history of openly endorsing certain political parties though not being directly affiliated themselves (Ryter 1998; Hefner 2005), studies have shown how the Pancasila Youth are able to influence hyper-local, regional politics through different means. During the 2015 Surabaya City regional elections, Fariz (2018) found that mobilisation generally came through internal communication within the organisation as a directive on who to vote for, which is determined by the Pancasila Youth elite in the region. The Surabaya City strategy is still closely aligned with Lasmanto and Imran (2021) findings on the priority of maintaining a good image, being against taking any financial support and explicity polarising public opinion (Fariz 2018). In another case, however, with the North Sumatra gubernatorial elections of 2008, Amin (2014) found that the Pancasila Youth resumed their preman role, where the organisation’s cadres used violence and extortion to maximise the regional government’s resources, depending on corrupt businessmen and local print media to create a mutually beneficial partnership in placing their favoured politician in office, which creates a contradictory statement on what the Pancasila Youth actually preaches. In Fariz (2018) and Amin’s (2014) research, individual members had little to no activity that was purely driven by the individual and their own personal beliefs. This is likely an effect of how the Pancasila Youth’s ranks, especially those of the foot-soldier class, come from the uneducated and underprivileged (Ryter 1998; Hefner 2005). Politically, this means that they lack impact and are ineffective.

This contradicts Schradie’s (2019) understanding of the conservative groups that she has studied, arguing that conservative CSOs consist of the highly-educated and upper middle-class, which translates to a lot of ‘informed’ individual mobilisation and able to act independently from their affiliated organisation if they choose to do so. The upper middle-class distinction, however, does apply to the majority of Islamic activists in Indonesia (Abdullah & Osman 2018), which could explain the FPI’s success in mobilising mass support. To borrow from Ruzza’s (2020) discussion on typologies of bad civil society, the Pancasila Youth could be classified as “evil acts done not intentionally” (p. 230). This is not to dismiss or justify their preman activities of violence and extortion, but through the scholarly research presented in this section, the Pancasila Youth display carelessness for the consequences, where their digital media strategy so far seems to be constructed in a way to fix their previous mistakes, such was the example provided by Pardede and Putri (2019). Their carelessness may be rooted in their shifting allegiances and constant redefining of which actors are allies and which are not (Ruzza 2020), which Fariz (2018) and Amin (2014) also touched on in their respective studies. The FPI, however, can be classified within the “bad communitarianism” of civil society as being an identity-based association (Ruzza 2020 p. 229). This group of civil society idealises like-minded communities, where membership to such organisations is, to an extent, exclusive and are defined with regards to other parts of the community that they deem undesirable, often defined through ethnic or racial terms (Ruzza 2020 p. 229). It is very clear which members of civil society is embraced by the FPI and which are derided, whereas it is more difficult and less straightforward to define group membership of the Pancasila Youth. Although much research on faith-based organisations, such as works by Bolotta, Scheer and Feener (2019) and Tomalin (2012), focus much on the connection between religion and development through a religious NGO framework, the FPI does constitute as a faith-based organisation. The FPI’s success can be attributed to being more locally embedded than other institutions and are more effective in mobilising people and resources, which is arguably a by-product of faith identity politics, some factors that Bolotta, Scheer and Feener (2019) and Tomalin (2012) discuss. Although the Pancasila Youth has shown its effectiveness in mobilising it sub-branch members throughout the country, it has lacked tangible impact on the national level.

Conclusion

This essay has shown that digital media does favour conservative elements of civil society, though not through Schradie’s (2019) definition. Conservative Indonesian CSOs succeed when religion, particularly Islam, is involved. Neoliberalism is not a popular theme in Indonesian civil society, where populist language and nationalist sentiment is also not enough to mobilise the masses, evident with the Pancasila Youth’s lack of impact. With religion in hand, a CSO such as the FPI can capitalise on digital media usage to reach a dangerous level of political power, influencing elections and public debate on a national scale, a characteristic Schradie (2019) did not find in her study. Religion and nationalism in and of itself is nuanced, showing that the Indonesian context still has much more to be explored on how conservative CSOs function and the combination of methods they use to spread and fuel their cause.

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Originally submitted as coursework for the Master of Global Media Communication, University of Melbourne