Indonesia’s missing Left and the Islamisation of dissent

The demise of Leftist political traditions in Indonesia has come to facilitate newer Islamic expressions of socio-political discontent accompanying socio-economic modernisation in localities that used to be dominated by communist and radical nationalist organisations. Because social grievances related to endemic issues like social injustice are increasingly being framed through Islamic cultural references, there will be implications for the workings of Indonesian democracy, premised on secular state institutions. But this does not lead to the sort of post-Islamism associated by Bayat with Iran, where the imperatives of running a modern state and economy once purportedly enabled pluralist social inclinations, albeit within an Islamised polity. Nor does it lead to the generalised ‘Islamisation of radicalism’ envisaged by Roy. Rather, what is witnessed is the substantial, though by no means uncontested, mainstreaming of social grievances through the lexicon of Islamic politics within Indonesian democracy even if there has been no take-over of the state by Islamic forces. The adoption of such framings even in the former bastions of the Indonesian Communist Party, once the third largest in the world, provides important insights into how hegemonic contests have taken place in the Muslim world after the end of the Cold War.