Redundancy of the dictator

"Hang Suharto and his family". President Suharto of Indonesia is too immersed in his own fantasy of eternal power to read the writ...

"Hang Suharto and his family". President Suharto of Indonesia is too immersed in his own fantasy of eternal power to read the writing on the banner. This is the predicament of every dictator: even when the ground beneath his feet swells with popular anger and national disillusion, he refuses to accept his own redundancy. And it seems the ageing Suharto, a retired army general who has been charting Indonesia’s destiny as the country’s undisputed helmsman for 32 years, is totally misreading the gravity of the moment. The student uprising has gone beyond the campus; it has now evolved into a popular tide against a regime which has no legitimacy. There was riot. There were deaths. But Suharto sees nothing, hears nothing, feels no remorse. Foreign investors are frightened. Economic recovery is a far cry. The rupiah is almost useless. Unemployment is high.

Food prices are spiralling. There is middle-class disillusion and there is turbulence in the ghettoes. But Suharto is not yet ready to subordinate his personalrelevance to national salvation. The Southeast Asian economic meltdown has not only exposed the fragile core of the Tigerdom. It has also brought into focus the price tag attached to Asia’s benevolent dictatorships, which continue to be defined in terms of the so-called Asian values.

But hang on. What are Asian values? Denial of freedom? Permanence of the paramount leader? Fettered citizen and free market? Or the Suhartos? Asian values are being played out on the Indonesian campuses, on the streets. It has always been like this: the campus crying out the conscience of a battered nation. It happened in Tiananmen Square. It happened in South Korea. And today it is happening in Indonesia, where cronyism is the name of governance. In alliterating agony, the protesters of Jakarta and elsewhere in the Suharto country call it "corruption and collusion". For, in Indonesia power and privilege are unequally distributed among the friends and family of Suharto. That was the dirty reality behind the once beguilingtigerhood. And Suharto’s earlier legitimacy was entirely based on the economic vigour of a country which was less than democratic. The dictator delivered the bread. Today that singular legitimacy has vanished. The only legitimacy Suharto has ever had. Time to go.

But the dictator doesn’t just walk out. Popular eruptions outside the palace of paranoia only aggravate his hallucinations about immortality. He prefers to be booted out by the vengeance of history. Mercifully, tanks and truncheons have not yet been fully applied in Indonesia. The military is enigmatically passive. Bad news for Suharto Inc. Worse for him if the romance of People’s Power (courtesy the forces that ended Marcos’ raj) envelops a country that has lost its self-esteem. When the nation is hungry and the people are disillusioned, history has a way of adding adjectives of liberation to the struggle of survival. When the last barricades of the dictatorship are broken, Suharto may not have the time to "become a pandito (sage) and getcloser to God". For this grand old man of oriental tyranny, it is perhaps time to get closer to reality. Better if he does it before retribution gets closer to him.

Police personnel seen to control the situation during a massive protest over the statehood demand and the inclusion of Ladakh under the Sixth Schedule, in Leh on Wednesday. (ANI Video Grab)

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