Indonesia’s minority groups felt a great sense of dismay when Meiliana, a  Buddhist Chinese Indonesian woman from Tanjungbalai, North Sumatra, was sentenced in August to 18 months in jail for blasphemy against Islam.

Her ordeal had started in 2016, when she had complained to a neighbour about the noisy calls of prayers broadcast through megaphones from a mosque nearby.

This incited anger from the local Muslims who then attacked her house and proceeded to vandalise and torch a number of Buddhist and Chinese temples.

Human rights groups pointed out the injustice of the sentence and accused the judge of pandering to hard-line Muslim groups,  especially since the vandals and arsonists ─ only a handful had been detained─ received light sentences.

Curiously, both President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo, who is seeking re-election next year, and his rival Prabowo Subianto, have avoided commenting on the issue altogether.

When pressed, President Jokowi told reporters he could not intervene in a legal matter and advised Meiliana to appeal the decision, without revealing whether he thought she had been treated fairly or not.

In light of next year’s presidential and legislative elections, such a tepid response could only be calculated. Coming from a president who has professed his support for diversity, it also sounds ominous.

Do votes of minority groups in Indonesia count so little that most politicians hardly make any effort to cultivate them?

There are signs that minority rights have become a fringe issue in the ongoing election campaign from both the camps of Mr Widodo and Mr Subianto.

The latter has blatantly embraced Muslim identity politics and counts its supporters as a constituent base. The former, seen as a champion of minority groups and pluralism in the last election, has conspicuously toned down his pro-minority stance in a bid to woo the Muslim majority.  

Minority issues have also taken a backseat with Indonesia’s political parties.  

No major political party took issue with the court ruling in Meiliana’s case. Only one minor party did: the newly formed Partai Solidaritas Indonesia (PSI), which has no seat in parliament and faces its first election next year.

President Jokowi’s about-turn on minority issues was underlined by his choice of Ma’ruf Amin, a conservative Muslim cleric, as his vice-presidential candidate. Mr Amin’s track record on sectarianism is strong.

In his role as a member of the Indonesian Council of Ulema, he was instrumental in issuing a fatwa against Ahmadi Muslims whom he branded as ‘heretical’ in 2016.

Mr Amin is also known to have declared the Shias heretics as well. He was an architect behind a fatwa forbidding Muslims to embrace secularism, liberalism and pluralism and has called for the criminalisation of LGBT activities.  

In the same month as Meiliana’s verdict, a number of churches in Cilegon, Banten, were forcibly closed by local authorities due to complaints by ‘members of the community’.

In September, three churches in Jambi, Central Sumatra, were also closed because they had no legal building permits. While this was a legal breach, most mosques in Indonesia also have no building permits.

This crackdown on minority groups elicited no statement of sympathy from either of the presidential candidates nor any political party, except for PSI.

PSI is a noteworthy phenomenon. Declaring itself part of President Jokowi’s coalition, it is run mostly by young politicians with no previous experience in public office.

Its Secretary General Raja Juli Antoni said that his party had been charged by his coalition with safeguarding the votes of ‘millennials and non Muslims.’

While the president and the parties supporting his re-election bid have not completely forgotten about minority groups, tasking a new party with no proven electoral record with attracting their votes suggests indicates a serious lack of priority.

Official data states that around 13 per cent of Indonesians identify themselves as non-Muslims.

This is not a small number, especially given that President Jokowi’s margin of victory in the 2014 presidential election was under 7 percentage points.

So why do candidates and political parties appear to underestimate the electoral impact of minority voters?

One possible explanation is that most members of the country’s minority groups do not strongly identify themselves as such.

So voters in this category opt for other overlaying identities, resulting in minority votes being too scattered to make any real difference.

But strong minority identity once thrived in the country. Right up to the 1970s the Protestants had their Parkindo (Christian Party of Indonesia) while the Catholics voted for Partai Katolik, until these minor parties were ordered by President Suharto to merge into a new party - the PDI (Indonesian Democratic Party) - to host ‘nationalist and non-Muslim interests’ in 1973.

One trait of Suharto’s 32-year rule was the entrenchment of the taboo of minority groups flaunting their identities.

Chinese Indonesians, for instance, were banned from expressing their culture.  The post-Suharto failure to resurrect political parties like Parkindo or Partai Katolik, although surviving as ‘mass organisations’, suggests the taboo lingers even today.

There is some truth that Indonesia’s minority groups are too un-organised and tend to shy away from political participation to become a force to be reckoned with.   

Despite President Jokowi’s contentious choice of running mate, a survey conducted by LSI right after the announcement only saw the president electability down by about one per cent.

To be taken more seriously by politicians, minority groups in Indonesia could benefit from higher political visibility. However, as the political downfall of former Chinese Indonesian Christian Governor of Jakarta, Basuki Tjahja Purnama (Ahok) demonstrates, this remains a political minefield.

Author Adam Schwarz once observed that Indonesia’s Muslim majority had the mentality of a minority group. As such, higher visibility by minority groups could trigger a backlash from the insecure majority.  

Coupled with the overwhelmingly populist outlook in the country’s politics, it may be sometime before minority rights can become a weighty consideration in any political contestation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Johannes Nugroho is a writer from Surabaya.