With opposition parties threatening to play the Islamic card on a broader scale, the appointment of National Intelligence Agency (BIN) director Budi Gunawan to a leading position on the Indonesian Mosque Council raises interesting questions ahead of President Joko Widodo’s bid for re-election next year.

The president has also named former armed forces commander General Moeldoko as his new chief of staff. That strengthens his circle of police and military loyalists as he prepares for what is likely to be a testing campaign season.

Vice-president Jusuf Kalla remains chairman of the Mosque Council, which oversees the country’s 800,000 mosques, many of them potential gathering points to rally support against Widodo when campaigning begins in earnest in August.

Legislative and presidential elections will be held together for the first time in April 2019, but the presidential race will get the most attention, with Widodo again expected to be in a two-way fight with opposition leader Prabowo Subianto.

Simultaneous elections mean that most of the horsetrading that normally drags on after a presidential election will have to be finalised beforehand, which is seen as advantageous to the president’s ruling Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P).

Gunawan’s first loyalty is to Megawati Sukarnoputri, PDI-P’s chairperson and a former president with whom Gunawan has had a close personal relationship going back to when he served as her adjutant. But he also spends much of his time at the palace briefing Widodo on domestic political developments.

Megawati has been prodding Widodo to choose either the ambitious Gunawan or her daughter, the human development coordinating minister Puan Maharani, as his running mate in 2019. However, most analysts say they would add little value to the ticket.

Widodo has never held a leading position in PDI-P. Just how hard Megawati pushes to get her way could determine whether he makes the difficult decision to jump to the second-placed Golkar Party, which has already declared its support for his candidacy.

The president recently used his considerable influence to engineer the election of industry minister Airlangga Hartarto, son of a Suharto-era technocrat, to the chairmanship of Golkar—the first new face to assume the party’s leadership since the democratic era began in 1998.

Widodo has a healthy lead over Prabowo in almost every poll so far. But, recalling how his rival made up ground in 2014, analysts note a troubling gap between Widodo’s popularity as a common-man leader and his electability.

The president is reportedly looking for a prominent Muslim figure as a running mate to counter Prabowo, who’s expected to use the same religion-based tactics that helped bring down ethnic-Chinese Jakarta governor Purnama Busaki last year. Prabowo, a retired general, is particularly critical of Widodo for cosying up to China and its cashed-up companies to secure funding for his potentially election-winning infrastructure program, telling friends he fears China will ‘swallow Indonesia and spit it out as a client state’.

Even with the help of the Sharia-based Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS), Prabowo may find it difficult to mount the sort of campaign used against Basuki at a national level now that the conservative coalition has split over his choice of candidates for June’s provincial and district elections.

Analysts believe that by joining the Mosque Council, Gunawan is seeking to burnish his Muslim credentials. But fellow panel member Azyumardi Azra, a leading Muslim intellectual, says it’ll take more than that to get Gunawan noticed as a political figure.

‘Budi Gunawan is trying to be greener, but fundamentally speaking that doesn’t mean he has Islamic credentials or will be regarded by Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah (Indonesia’s two mass Muslim organisations) as a santri (devout) Muslim’, he says.

Azra questions how useful being on the loosely structured council will be when BIN already has ‘layers’ of intelligence agents and informants monitoring mosques that are considered problematic for hate-speech or other extremist activity.

Meanwhile, naming Moeldoko as his chief of staff leaves Widodo with a trusted inner circle that includes new military commander Air Chief Marshal Hadi Tjahjanto, police chief General Tito Karnavian, defence minister Ryamizard Ryacudu and political adviser Luhut Panjaitan, an ex-special forces general who’s serving as maritime coordinating minister.

Agung Gumelar, a retired special forces general and former transportation minister, has just joined Suharto-era army chief General Subagyo Hadi Siswoyo on the president’s nine-man advisory council.

Moeldoko replaces mild-mannered anti-corruption activist Teten Masduki, who is a personal friend of Jokowi but doesn’t have the hard edge the president needs from his day-to-day manager and gatekeeper as the election season approaches. A member of the People’s Conscience Party (Hanura), Moeldoko was an adjutant to intelligence guru Abdullah Hendropriyono, another long-time Megawati ally.

Hendropriyono’s son, Diaz, is part of Widodo’s special staff. His son-in-law, former presidential security chief Lieutenant General Andika Perkasa, was recently promoted to head the military’s training command, which puts him in line for the top army post in early 2019.

Wiranto, a retired armed forces chief himself and now leader of the People’s Conscience Party, has been allied with the president since the outset, initially to put a dent in the ambitions of Prabowo, with whom he’d engaged in a bitter power struggle in the aftermath of Suharto’s downfall in mid-1998.

Surrounding himself with uniformed loyalists does mean Widodo is returning to a different era, but it will give the opposition pause over just how far it can go in trying to deny the president a second term.

After the debacle over Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) commander General Gatot Nurmantyo’s short-lived unilateral suspension of military co-operation with Australia, can President Joko Widodo afford to let his military chief serve through until his mandatory retirement next year?

It wasn’t the first time that the 56-year-old Nurmantyo has blindsided the country’s commander-in-chief and it mightn’t be the last given his growing reputation as a loose cannon and his apparent ambition to run in the 2019 presidential election.

Lacking any political party support, it isn’t that he’s shaping up as a genuine election threat at this stage. And the lesson of his predecessor is notable: General Moeldoko had the same misguided ambition before melting into obscurity after he handed over command in July 2015.

But Nurmantyo has clearly unsettled Widodo because of his alleged links to the hardline Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and other Muslim groups which staged the two recent mass demonstrations against Jakarta’s ethnic-Chinese governor, Basuki Tjahaya Purnama. Insiders say the president suspects Purnama, now on trial for blasphemy, wasn’t the only target of the protests and that political rivals are using the case to weaken him ahead of 2019 when he’s expected to run for re-election.

Nurmantyo may have done some damage to relations with Canberra, but the impact won’t be far-reaching thanks to the efforts of Widodo, political coordinating minister Wiranto and even nationalistic Defence Minister Ryamizard Ryacudu to help smooth things over.

Firing senior figures for insubordination is rarely done in Indonesia, but Nurmantyo’s actions are making Widodo look weak and ineffectual—something he can ill-afford at this stage of the political game. Short of dismissing him, the president may do the next best thing and apply police pressure on FPI leader Habib Rizieq, the racist firebrand who has become increasingly emboldened in his campaign to turn Indonesia into an Islamic state.

As army chief of staff in the early 2000s, Ryamizard was equally problematic, openly opposing the 2005 Aceh peace agreement and expressing suspicions about Indonesian officers who were being trained abroad—just as Nurmantyo is doing now. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono did nothing at the time, but he subsequently sidelined Ryamizard, who despite all the misgivings at the time of his appointment to the defence portfolio, has mellowed with age.  

The days when the military seemed to be a conduit to higher office in Indonesia are long gone, even if Yudhoyono rose to the rank of a three-star general during his 27-year military career. It was only after president Abdurrahman Wahid plucked him from the military to become mines and energy minister and later political coordinating minister that he started on the path to the Presidential Palace.

Unlike Nurmantyo and Moeldoko, Yudhoyono is highly-educated and, for all his many faults, brought Indonesia back onto the world stage after languishing in the shadows through the early chaotic years of democratic rule. Nurmantyo is a throwback to an earlier era, an ultra-nationalist who has never had outside experience and believes Australians and other foreigners are engaged in a so-called ‘proxy war’ aimed at eventually taking over Indonesia.

A 1982 military academy graduate, Nurmantyo would have only been a captain when the US suspended all military co-operation with Indonesia over the 1991 Dili massacre, a ban that stayed in place until 2005. As a result, a generation of Indonesian officers were deprived of the opportunity to train overseas, an education that would have widened their horizons and perhaps stifled a national tendency to buy into wild conspiracy theories.

Nurmantyo does that in spades. He’s been spreading his fiery proxy war diatribes in speeches and on social media since becoming chief of the Army Strategic Reserve (Kostrad), Indonesia’s main combat formation, in 2013.

The General claims ‘many countries’ are jealous of Indonesia’s economic performance and its rich store of natural resources and shares the widely-held suspicion that US Marines training in northern Australia have their eyes on seizing Papua. ‘Tainted officers (like him) are unable to see the Pentagon is running out of midnight oil planning the destabilization of Indonesia,’ says one US graduate of Indonesia’s Command and Staff College. ‘We left a generation of officers in the dark and shouldn’t be surprised at the result.’

Widodo, for his part, has only himself to blame for hand-picking Nurmantyo as Moeldoko’s replacement and ignoring what had become the new democratic-era tradition of rotating the TNI’s top post among the three armed services.

Under that process, the job should have gone to air force commander Air Chief Marshal Agus Supriatna. But he had only just been promoted and Widodo needed an army man with experience as he struggled to deal with ruling Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI) leader Megawati Sukarnoputri and her favoured candidate for national police chief.

Some analysts exaggerate Nurmantyo’s links to the FPI and overlook what loyalty he may or may not command among the rest of the army leadership, where only deputy army chief Lt-General Erwin Syafitri, 57, is a 1982 classmate—and he’s due to retire in April. Low-key army chief General  Mulyono, 56, is a 1983 graduate and Lieutenant-General Edy Rahmayadi, 55, the head of the Kostrad, comes from the class of 1985. Both will step down in 2019 as the army goes through another generational change which Indonesian analysts doubt will be any more enlightened than the last.

In the meantime, how Widodo manages to regain his balance is going to be closely watched. By failing to stand his ground and show who’s in charge, he risks leaving the door open in 2019 to the possible return of someone who does—his 2014 presidential rival, tough-minded opposition leader and retired general Prabowo Subianto.

Not given to panic or over-reaction, President Joko Widodo’s decision to postpone his visit to Australia was well justified in the face of the biggest mass demonstration on the streets of Jakarta and other Indonesian cities since the fall of president Suharto 17 years ago.

In hastening to reassure Australian officials that the visit would be re-scheduled, Widodo clearly wanted to also show that the 4 November demonstration by hard-line Islamic groups and its violent aftermath had not thrown him off his stride and there was no danger of it spreading into something bigger.

But as peaceful as most of them were during the 4 November protest, extremist Islamic groups pushing for the prosecution of ethnic-Chinese Jakarta Governor Barsuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama on blasphemy charges are unlikely to stop here if police investigations determine he doesn’t have a case to answer.

In the end, this isn’t just about politics and Purnama’s bid to win a second term in next February’s gubernatorial elections. There’s a much greater issue at stake, which could well determine Indonesia’s future as a pluralistic state.

What persuaded Widodo to scrap his Australian visit was an outbreak of violence in North Jakarta on the evening of the protest, which spooked a Chinese community still mindful of the way it was targeted in riots that preceded president Suharto’s fall from power in 1998.

The blasphemy allegation stems from Purnama’s careless remark last month that Muslim voters shouldn’t allow themselves to be fooled by a Koranic verse supposedly instructing them not to accept non-Muslim leaders.

Like it or not, the verse known as al-Maidah 51 is a stark reminder of the conflict which exists between conservative interpretations of the Koran and the country’s laws, most notably the 1945 Constitution which lies at the foundation of the secular state.

The world’s most populous Muslim nation likes to see itself as a shining example of how Islam and democracy can co-exist, but even mainstream Indonesian Muslims do not necessarily agree with the separation of mosque and state.

Outspoken at the best of times, Purnama should have known better. But a misstep doesn’t explain the strength of the outcry, bringing together not only the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI) and other radical groups, but also powerful political interests determined to kill off his career.

Islamic hardliners have chafed over having an ‘infidel’ in charge of the teeming Indonesian capital ever since Purnama was elevated from his vice-governor position when Widodo, then the incumbent governor, became president in late 2014.

Human rights groups are now calling for a review of the country’s 1965 blasphemy statute, which they say is at odds with a Constitution that guarantees freedom of religion. Rarely employed until Yudhoyono took power, it was used to convict more than 100 people over the next decade.

Activists are also seeking stricter enforcement of an article in the Criminal Code, prescribing five years’ imprisonment for those found guilty of displaying hostility, hatred or contempt towards any group of people, in this case non-Muslims.

Backed by ex-president Megawati Sukarnoputri’s Indonesian Democratic Party for Struggle (PDI-P), Purnama still tops the polls ahead of former education minister, Anies Baswedan, and Agus Yudhoyono, the elder son of former president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Both of Purnama’s rivals were last-minute entrants in the field, with Baswedan supported by the Sharia-based Justice and Prosperity Party (PKS) and former presidential candidate Prabowo’s Subianto’s Great Indonesia Movement Party (Gerindra). Now that his younger brother has failed to measure up as a politician, Agus Yudhoyono was plucked from a promising military career to represent his father’s Democrat Party in what some analysts believe is an effort to create a political dynasty.

If Purnama is cleared of the blasphemy charge, it will be interesting to see if voters have been influenced by the outcry. In the 2012 gubernatorial elections, Widodo and his running mate won by a landslide, in large part because of efforts to attack them on primordial grounds.

An average of around 12 percent of Indonesians have voted for sharia-based political parties in the four national elections held since the country embarked on the road to democracy after the fall of Suharto in 1998. But there’s a limit. It will still take many more years, if ever, before a non-Muslim becomes president of Indonesia.

The police say they will decide in a fortnight whether Purnama is to be charged, but their cautious approach may have something to do with national police chief Gen Tito Karnavian being a former head of the Detachment 88 counter-terrorism unit. He and other counter-terrorism officers have often criticized the lack of political will in preventing the sort of inflammatory rhetoric from extremist clerics which serves as the ideological underpinnings of terrorist and other violent actions.

Now on more secure political ground, Widodo played his cards well in the lead up to the 4 November demonstration, personally urging the country’s political parties and its two largest Muslim organisations, Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah, to prevent the situation from spinning out of control. But in noting that Widodo spent most of that day out of town, critics are worried he may be following the lead of President Yudhoyono, who was widely criticized for allowing extremists to seize the momentum during his decade-long rule.

If he wavers now, in the face of a threatened second rally on 25 November, the constitutional veracity of Pancasila—Indonesia’s state philosophy, and the national rallying cry of Unity in Diversity will both be at risk.

It has been 50 years since the Indonesian military crushed the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) in a bloody pogrom that’s widely believed to have taken at least 500,000 lives—many of them innocent victims of personal vendettas.

Yet, in what appears to be another effort to retain legitimacy and reclaim some of their previous role in internal security, Indonesia’s generals—and other conservative elements—continue to defy history and insist that communism remains a threat.

Indeed, the latest Reds-Under-the-Beds controversy reached ridiculous levels recently when two people were arrested for wearing T-shirts bearing the letters PKI, which actually stood for Pecinta Kopi Indonesia (Indonesian Coffee Lovers).

The only country in Asia—and indeed one of the few places in the world—where there’s still a communist insurgency is the Philippines, largely the result of the age-old feudalism that continues to dominate the political landscape. After watching the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) implode in the early 1980s, the Thai Army has never revisited it as a threat, instead using social conflicts and the looming monarchical transition as pretexts for political intervention.

While the overthrow of presidents Sukarno and later Abdurrahman Wahid were the result of direct military pressure, the Indonesian Armed Forces (TNI) has always sought to operate under a contrived cloak of constitutionality.

But the TNI’s re-positioning as an external defence force in the aftermath of president Suharto’s 1998 downfall has never sat well with the officer corps and army retirees, whose contempt for civilian politicians goes back to the struggle for independence.

As silly as it seems, the spectre of the communist bogeyman still fuels fears in a country which once harboured the world’s largest non-ruling communist party and hovered, ever so briefly, on the brink of being transformed into a Marxist-Leninist state. The 1965-66 pogrom forestalled that, but every time there is an effort among political activists to delve into and redress the excesses of that period, the military and conservative Muslim diehards are quick to stoke the underlying phobia.

That’s what happened after President Joko Widodo’s government surprisingly supported a two-day national symposium on the 1965–66 killings, designed to facilitate a first-ever meeting between the military and survivors of the atrocities. But then he felt compelled to balance that act of contrition by instructing the TNI and the national police to uphold the law against efforts to spread communist teachings by seizing books and items containing hammer and sickle imagery.

Predictably, they overreacted. When Widodo ordered a halt to the heavy-handed crackdown, it continued all the same, with hard-line Defence Minister, Ryamizard Ryacudu, claiming PKI elements were behind a renewed Leftist surge.

It was only in the early 2000s that the thousands of Indonesians rounded up and mostly imprisoned without trial in the mid-1960s were no longer forced to carry identity cards stamped with ‘EX-TAPOL’ (political prisoner)—letters that condemned them and their immediate families to a life of discrimination.

Banners thrown up across Jakarta streets warn about the dangers of terrorism, narcotics—and communism. And judging by the views of military conservatives and Islamic diehards alike, it isn’t necessarily in that order.

In 2007, the Attorney General’s Office banned dozens of school text books that neglected to mention the PKI’s involvement in the events of 30 September 1965, in which six top generals were abducted and murdered.

It was that event which led to the overthrow of founding president Sukarno and the emergence of Suharto, a little-known general who, with the connivance of the elite, was to amass extraordinary powers during his 32-year-rule.

Banned from Indonesia until the late 1990s, the late American academic Ben Anderson always cast doubt on the official version. But long after the former strongman was forced to resign, all the official blame remains where it has always been—with the PKI.

Whatever the truth of 1965, retaining the ghosts of the past allowed the elite to underpin the legitimacy of Suharto’s New Order regime. The same has applied to Muslim groups such as Nahdlatul Ulama whose role in the blood-letting has been pushed under the carpet. Unlike Indonesia, Thailand and its military have never retained a communist hang-up, even if at the height of a virulent insurgency in the early 1970s, there were more than 17,000 Maoist guerrillas operating across the country.

Certainly, many Thais recall that when Saigon, Phnom Penh and Vientiane fell in quick succession, the old domino theory, which foresaw the rest of Southeast Asia tumbling under the communist tide, seemed to be close to reality. But once that danger had passed and the CPT became the victim of its own internal dissent and the ideological split between Vietnam and China, it was soon forgotten.

There were few, if any, recriminations—even against senior CPT cadres. The Leftist students who had fled to the jungle filtered back into society, finished their education and joined the ranks of the capitalists.

Perhaps the most remarkable example of Thailand’s relaxed attitude is the story of former prime minister, Surayud Chulanont, who rose to become Thai Army commander despite his father being a member of the CPT central committee.

When Phayom Chulanont died in exile in Beijing, Surayud went to China to bring back his ashes. Such poignancy would have been unheard of in Indonesia. Not only would Surayud have never been recruited into the military, he would have lived the life of a reviled outcast.

Indonesia’s religious affairs minister, Lukman Hamid Saifuddin, is a breath of fresh air.

He’s a break from a long line of ineffectual predecessors who did nothing to defend minorities and showed extreme cowardice in facing up to those wanting to impose an Arabic culture on Indonesia.

A member of the sharia-based United Development Party (PPP), the 52-year-old Saifuddin is taking a nationalist approach to the religious debate, arguing that Indonesian Muslims should embrace what he calls Islam Nusantara, or Islam of the Archipelago.

In essence, he’s saying that because Indonesia is so culturally different from the cradle of Islam, the world’s largest Muslim nation should follow its own version of Islam, which emphasises moderation and tolerance, and supports indigenous cultures and the rights of women.

Saifuddin notes that because Islam came from the Middle East, there’s a widely held perception that only Middle Eastern traditions are legitimate. ‘Yet, anywhere in the world, Islamic values are based on local culture,’ he says. ‘In India, Egypt, Sudan and China, for example, Islamic values are part of the local culture.’

It’s an effective defence against hardliners who claim he’s pushing deviant thought, particularly in his support of the controversial Javanese-style chanting intonation of the Koran which appears to have divided many of the country’s Islamic clergy.

What makes Saifuddin’s open-minded approach compelling is that he was educated solely in Indonesia, first at a progressive Gontor Islamic boarding school in East Java and then at the Jakarta’s As-Syafi’iyah Islamic University where he obtained his BA.

Other Gontor graduates include Hasyim Muzadi and Din Syamsuddin, former chairmen of Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) and Muhammadiyah, the country’s two largest mass Muslim organisations, and the late Muslim intellectual Nurcholish Madjid.

A three-term parliamentarian, Saifuddin is receiving powerful backing, beginning with President Joko Widodo who told a 23 July meeting of religious leaders:

This nation will only progress if it succeeds in overcoming the problems of tribalism, religion and race.

But it will take more than words. NU, which the minister is a prominent member of, is finally speaking out against the way successive governments have allowed hard-liners to slowly eat away at Indonesia’s pluralistic traditions.

NU Supreme Council chairman Mustofa Bisri told foreign journalists that with more political will, the Government could be playing a vital role in efforts to counter the influence of the Islamic State of Syria and Iraq (ISIS) and other extremist groups.

Islam Nusantara was the main theme at NU’s five-yearly congress in the Central Java city of Jombong last month. In the weeks prior to that, Bisri was among a range of senior religious figures warning of the threat to Indonesia’s inclusiveness from ignorance and poverty.

‘The benefits of tolerance must be recognised,’ Saifuddin said in a recent interview with Tempo magazine. ‘The way to do it is to be more pro-active in respecting and honoring others, instead of demanding and insisting that others understand you.’

Indonesia has suffered through a long line of ineffectual religious affairs ministers. Saifuddin’s predecessor, former PPP leader Suryadarma Ali was forced to step down last year to face charges of stealing from a US$5 billion state-sponsored pilgrimage fund.

Others before him have been little more than dead wood, unable to take an objective view of issues involving other faiths and beliefs, and currying favour with the hardline clerics who have dominated the religious debate since the birth of democratisation.

Police admitted recently they were reluctant to crack down on hate speech because there were no ‘rewards’ for doing so, something that also applies to a wide range of infractions which flourish in Indonesian society because of a lack of law enforcement.

Critics say apart from fearing a backlash, police and other local officials often can’t separate their official duties from their personal beliefs, either siding with the majority or doing nothing to protect minorities.

The media hasn’t been any better.

The National Commission of Human Rights’ latest report cited 14 cases of serious religious intolerance in the April–June period, including the persecution of the Ahmadiyah Muslim sect in South Jakarta, the closure of churches in Aceh and the criminalisation of Shiites in Bogor.

In his quest to make Islam more ‘friendly,’ Saifuddin has aroused controversy by questioning why all restaurants should be closed during Ramadan fasting hours and in taking aim at other dictates that have taken hold in recent years more by default than anything else.

Largely repressed for much of President Suharto’s 32-year rule, Islam has underwent a significant revival in the democratic space created after his downfall. But it has also led to a revival of extremism as well, and a worrying drift in which the mainstream majority acts like a minority.

Saifuddin argues that unlike the bloody conflicts that accompanied Islam’s spread into Europe and African, not a drop of blood was shed when it was introduced into an archipelago that had previously embraced Hindu and Buddhist values until the close of the 13th century.

That hasn’t always been the case over the past 15 years, however. Indeed, the minister knows better than anyone that new legislation seeking to promote interfaith harmony will be meaningless unless it’s accompanied by a change in mainstream attitudes, as moderate as they generally appear to be.