The COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating gender inequality in global supply chains. Because COVID-19 has hit low-paid manufacturing sectors where women work in large proportions, these consequences are not gender-neutral. The ILO reports, for example, that 2 out of 5 workers in the Asia-Pacific garment industry have not returned to work after factory closures. Women in the garment sector represent a majority of workers in the industry and contribute to 5.2% of the region’s total women’s labour force.

Yet amid the pandemic, the invisible labour performed by many women in Asia has not merely doubled but tripled. Not only are many women workers primary caregivers at home, some are also active unionists facing an uphill battle to protect the rights of the region’s most vulnerable workers.

The disrupted global supply chain, where demand from global buyers has dropped, sets suppliers up in a position of weak bargaining power. Demand for garment production has dropped by some 70%, with the availability of input supplies also down. The cancellation of buyers’ orders and lockdowns have necessitated temporary and indefinite factory closures. Actions taken by industrial companies have mostly transferred the risk to women workers. Approximately 60% of garment suppliers in Asian countries have dismissed some workers, while half have terminated more than 10% of their labour force.

For those still in work, many women workers in Asia from manufacturing sectors are suffering both reduced and delayed pay. According to Willis Towers Watson, 34% of 3,800 companies across 22 Asia-Pacific countries have adjusted their wages. In Bangladesh, some 32 per cent of workers in 80 factories have experienced late payments.

Unions are a crucial channel for workers to exercise their bargaining power through dialogue with companies and governments. Rights to organise and collective bargaining are ways for unions to propose, design and evaluate social protection schemes to improve the livelihoods of workers. Unions are also pillars of democracy that support political organising and the mobilisation of collective power.

But for women union leaders, the triple burden of work in the house, workplace and union is a delicate balancing act. With children expected to do online schooling from home during the pandemic, many working mothers are now carrying larger burdens outside of work hours, with gender expectations placing the lion’s share of domestic work on their shoulders.

The Inter-Factory Workers’ Federation (FBLP but currently in the process of changing its name to the Federation of United Indonesian Workers Unions/FSBPI) is one case study of women workers building collective power as a way to protect their rights. Active since 2009, the union federation emerged from disappointment and anger at company-dominated  “yellow unions” that did not represent worker interests. Many FBLP members recounted resenting seeing male leaders of yellow unions flaunt their wealth while workers were deficiently paid.

In a culmination of anger and frustration, in 2010, the union successfully organised a large strike in Kawasan Berikat Nusantara (KBN Cakung), the most significant Export Processing Zone in greater Jakarta, for an increase to the minimum wage from 1.1 million rupiahs (US$79) per month to 1.4 million rupiahs (US$99) per month. As a women workers’ union with some 1,000 members, FBLP has gained a reputation for fighting for rights from living wages, fair working hours, to paid days off.

Jumisih, as well as being a “full-time” unionist and leader, is also a wife and mother of a 13-year-old son. She has been the primary breadwinner in her family since her husband lost his job last year, though most of her time is spent with the union. Before the pandemic, Jumisih often slept at the union’s headquarters. After March 2020 though, she rarely went into the office until the Indonesian government and the Jakarta municipality announced the lifting of the lockdown.

During the lockdown, Jumisih struggled to manage roles in three equally demanding worlds, while fretting over fears her family would be exposed to the virus. “I’m so exhausted helping my son attend online classes that I have to manage my time precisely. I also organise workers on the weekends.” Her union works hard to gather collective funds as alternative safety nets, distributing food and cash to women workers to support workers without access to formal social protection.

Now corporations are using COVID-19 as a pretext to dismantle and crackdown on unions. Rahma is a leader of a factory-level union under FBLP as well as a worker at PT Amos Indah Indonesia, a garment factory located in KBN Cakung. She recounts that management refused to meet the union when it ordered approximately 800 workers to have unpaid time off for two weeks, which both Jumisih and Rahma argue are violations of labour law. Management then asked them to continue working with wage cuts afterwards. The transition to online communications during factory closures have made it easier for management to deny requests for meetings, or not to respond at all, Rahma says. Frustrated by being ignored, she, together with Jumisih and other FBLP leaders, mobilised workers to strike on several occasions.

Under lockdown, women unionists have had to adapt their modes of organisation, maximising virtual spaces to allow workers to gather. Just a month after the pandemic, together with the organisation Perempuan Mahardhika, FBLP leaders have organised weekly discussions called Ngobras (Ngobrol Santai Bareng Buruh – an informal discussion with workers) every weekend when workers have days off. Discussions span many topics, such as a living wage, maternity rights, rights to housing, decent work and sexual harassment. During discussions, cameras reveal how many members spend their weekends; many listen while doing their domestic chores or taking care of children.

Still, leaders continue to view “offline” strikes as the central strategy for sustaining solidarity among workers. The labour movement is currently focussed on the recently passed Omnibus Law (Law on Job Creation) whose informalisation of work makes workers more vulnerable to poverty wages and poor working conditions. Before the Omnibus Law’s passage, unions protested at both the Ministry of Labour and the Indonesian parliament. Strikes against the Omnibus Law were exhausting for unions because they took place over multiple weeks and saw outbreaks of violence, with some unionists eventually arrested. “I always hide my family’s identity because I don’t want them to be impacted by my activism,” Jumisih said.

For women unionists, the delicate balancing of labour across the home, workplace and union is no small burden. They face not only the existential threat of a pandemic in their family and community lives, but maintain a presence for women workers struggling in industrial relations. Despite the heavier burdens they carry during the crisis, militancy remains at the heart of their struggle.

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Last September, I drove for four hours from Jakarta to a small town in western Java, staying one night in a Javanese-styled hotel at the foot of Mt. Ciremai, a 3,000-meter volcano on Java. When I got to Cisantana, I journeyed down a stone path, looking for the Mother Mary shrine. It was a welcome surprise to see this Catholic shrine, equipped with a tropical version of the Via Dolorosa—the route believed to have been taken by Jesus through Jerusalem to Calvary—and supported by electricity coming from a nearby Islamic boarding school.

The presence of such a shrine was all the more surprising in West Java, one of Indonesia’s most conservative Muslim provinces, where attacks against Christians, Ahmadis, and other religious minorities frequently make headlines in local news. Attacks against women’s rights, private gay parties, and transgender crowds are not uncommon.

I continued walking past avocado farms, a banana plantation, and cornfields and finally came upon an open space where a handful of Sundanese women and men were working to construct a tomb.

They were very pleasant. “It’s a quiet day today,” an elderly man said to me. They were taking a break and welcomed me to sit in their bamboo hut with a fire stove.

A woman showed me phone videos of the work they did with more than 100 volunteers, who used wooden poles and bamboo to bring several huge stones from a nearby river to this spot, which is inaccessible by road. They called the tomb “Batu Satangtung” or the “Human Stone,” intended for their elderly religious leader and his wife.

I imagined the makers of Stonehenge might have used similar methods two or three millennia ago in England.

The Sundanese people are from West Java, a province of about 40 million. They are the second largest ethnic group in Indonesia, after the neighbouring Javanese. The volunteers I met are not only Sundanese but of the ethnic-religious group Sunda Wiwitan. The name literally means “early Sunda” or “real Sunda.” Its practitioners assert that Sunda Wiwitan has been part of the Sundanese way of life since before the arrival of Hinduism and Islam.

Why were they building the tomb here? Ela Romlah, the woman with the videos, told me that in 1937 and 1938, when Mt. Ciremai was expected to erupt, Pangeran Madrais—then the leader of this group—and his followers climbed the mountain, carrying a set of gamelan instruments. He and hundreds of his musicians played the gamelan on the mountain for months. They believed their music and prayer stopped the eruption. “They then set up a camp at the foot of the mountain. It was here in Curug Goong.”

Madrais was an inspirational cleric, interpreting old Sundanese and Javanese beliefs. He helped establish the community in 1925.

The Sunda Wiwitan tomb site. Image supplied by the author. ©2020 Andreas Harsono/Human Rights Watch

The Dutch colonial officials in charge at the time were not amused to see this kind of independent behaviour. They tried to prevent hundreds of Sundanese people from staying at Curug Goong. But they said nothing when Mt. Ciremai calmed down.

In August 1945, at the end of World War II, Indonesia’s independence leaders adopted a constitution that vowed to protect all Indonesian citizens equally. But they also reached a political compromise with conservative Muslims, including Wahid Hasjim, the chairman of the Nahdlatul Ulama. The agreement, designed to avoid setting up an Islamic state, established the Ministry of Religious Affairs to be “the bridge” between Muslims and the state. The compromise was called Pancasila.

In Garut, about four hours’ drive from Curug Goong, Islamist militants were not satisfied with this and declared the Darul Islam (Islamic State) movement in August 1949, vowing to implement their version of Sharia in Indonesia. From 1950 to 1958, Darul Islam conducted a failed guerrilla campaign in West Java that nonetheless attracted some popular support. They attacked not only the Indonesian military but also religious minorities.

In response, Wahid Hasjim, the minister of religious affairs, adopted a 1952 decree to differentiate between “kepercayaan” (faith) and “agama” (religion). In Indonesian vocabulary, “aliran kepercayaan” is officially used to cover multiple minor religions and spiritual movements. Hasjim decreed that “aliran kepercayaan” are “dogmatic ideas, intertwined with the living customs of various ethnic groups, especially among those who are still underdeveloped, whose main beliefs are the customs of their ancestors throughout the ages.”

Meanwhile, “agama” was defined according to monotheistic understandings. If a community is to be recognised as “religious,” it must adhere to “an internationally recognised monotheistic creed; taught by a prophet through the scriptures.” In this way the decree discriminates against non-monotheistic religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Bahaism, Zoroastrianism and hundreds of local religions and spiritual movements in Indonesia.

In West Java, the Sunda Wiwitan people faced two serious challenges: the Darul Islam militants, who repeatedly intimidated and attacked them, and the Ministry of Religious Affairs, which actively tried to align “underdeveloped religions” such as theirs with Christianity or Islam.

In 1954, Darul Islam militants attacked the Sunda Wiwitan base in Kuningan. “They managed to burn our paseban (communal spaces) including the kitchen and the garages but fortunately not the main hall,” she said. “They forced our members to convert to Islam,” said Dewi Kanti, a great granddaughter of Madrais.

Similar intimidation and violence took place in neighbouring regencies Tasikmalaya, Banjar, and Garut. Dewi’s grandfather, Pangeran Tedja Buwana, who succeeded Madrais, fled Kuningan to Bandung.

Darul Islam also sent militants into Jakarta. On November 30, 1957, President Sukarno attended a school function at which a Darul Islam militant threw a grenade. Sukarno was unharmed, but six schoolchildren died.

Even after Darul Islam had been militarily defeated, eight Darul Islam militants mingled with a Muslim congregation during a prayer service inside the State Palace on May 14, 1962. They fired shots at Sukarno but missed, hitting one of his bodyguards and a Muslim scholar instead.

Muslim conservatives continued their opposition to smaller religions and spiritual movements. To placate hardliners, Sukarno banned the Indonesian Freemasons (Vrijmetselaren-Loge) along with six so-called “affiliates,” without providing evidence of any illegal links: the Bahai Indonesia organisation, the Divine Life Society, the Moral Rearmament Movement, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, the Rotary Club and the Democracy League, a non-religious organisation considered to be critical of Sukarno. The Rotary Club was accused of being a Zionist group; this was essentially  a conspiracy theory intended to connect the Freemasons to the six organisations.

In June 1964, the Kuningan authorities declared Sunda Wiwitan marriages illegal. The Kuningan prosecutor’s office later detained nine believers—a priest and eight young grooms who married in Sundanese Wiwitan rituals—for several months.

A portrait of Sunda Wiwitan faith leader, Prince Tedja Buwana. © 2020 Andreas Harsono/Human Rights Watch

Anticipating increased hostilities, Tedja Buwana, who had returned from Bandung, left the Sunda Wiwitan faith, joined the Catholic church and used their paseban as a church. His move prompted 5,000 Sunda Wiwitan believers to convert to Catholicism, according to a researcher, Cornelius Iman Sukmana, himself a Catholic in Kuningan, who wrote a book about the Sunda Wiwitan and the Catholic church.

“It was an important decision. My grandfather saved thousands of our members from accusations of atheism,” said Dewi Kanti, referring to massacres of the communists between 1965 and 1969. “We can’t imagine what would have happened if he didn’t do it.”

Decades later, when the situation finally calmed down, many of these Sunda Wiwitan people, including Dewi Kanti, openly, but not offficially, re-converted to Sunda Wiwitan. Many who converted away from Christianity still go to Sunday mass and wear a cross around their necks. But inside their pockets, they also have Sunda Wiwitan pendants (a mountain, an eagle and two snakes).

“It is common in Kuningan to meet a single family with several religions,” said a vendor near the shrine.

As I walked down from the tomb, I wondered if these conversions and re-conversions prove that religious identity is not a zero-sum game. Identity is somehow imagined like a container with a fixed volume; if you have more of one identity, you have less of another. The Sunda Wiwitan people showed me that they could expand the container and have multiple identities. Thinking of it from this perspective, it is no surprise that I found a tropical Via Dolorosa and an Islamic boarding school near the tomb construction.

The 1965 Blasphemy Law

In downtown Kuningan, I drove to the paseban area, looking at the beautiful wooden hall and sipping a smooth ginger-lemon tea while chatting with Okky Satrio Djati, a Catholic Javanese, who had married the Sunda Wiwitan leader Dewi Kanti almost two decades earlier.

Djati and I used to work together in a newsroom during the Suharto era, publishing online samizdat and managing a mobile internet server. He went to Kuningan in 1998 when President Suharto was facing the mass protests at the height of the Asian economic crisis and helped hide political activists fleeing trouble.

Djati is now a Sunda Wiwitan member, speaking Sundanese, burning incense and sometimes performing midnight prayers in a nearby mountain. “He seems to be more Sundanese than me,” said Kanti, with a giggle.

Djati helps his wife deal with the discrimination that many Sunda Wiwitan members face. “My husband chose Catholicism as his official religion,” Kanti said. “But he practices Kejawen faith. If we insisted on marrying with our own (real) religions, we wouldn’t have birth certificates for our children, or at least, not with my husband’s name on them.”

Under Indonesia’s legal system, an ethnic believer cannot put their kepercayaan on the agama column of their national ID cards and thus cannot legally marry unless they change their kepercayaan to a recognised religion. In these cases, they leave a blank space in the religion column of the card and the civil registration office does not recognise paternity because the couples are not officially married.

The Sunda Wiwitan “paseban” (house of worship) in Kuningan, West Java, was also used as a Catholic church. © 2020 Andreas Harsono/Human Rights Watch

Problems for religious minorities escalated in January 1965 when President Sukarno issued a decree that prohibited people from being hostile toward religions or committing blasphemy, which is defined as “abuse” and “desecration” of a religion. Sukarno decreed that the government would steer “mystical sects … toward a healthy way of thinking and believing in the One and Only God.” The decree, which gave official approval only to Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, was immediately incorporated into the Criminal Code as article 156(a), with a maximum penalty of five years in prison. This has had disastrous effects until the present.

After deposing Sukarno, Suharto and his regime enforced the 1952 decree, which also requires a religion to have a holy book, leading to many bizarre stories of “religious alignment.” In Kalimantan, Dayak tribal leaders created the Panaturan –a collection of Dayak ancestral wisdom compiled into a single “holy book.” This required the creation of a clergy, so Dayak priests were trained. Religious rituals once held in fields and homes were moved into new worship halls called Balai Basarah. But most importantly, Kaharingan religious leaders had to choose a permitted religion to align with. They chose Hinduism, and thus became “Kaharingan Hindu.” But do not ask them about Ganesh or karma!

President Suharto’s wrote about his own Javanese Kejawen faith and Islam in his 1989 authorised biography. He described the syncretism common among the Javanese, conducting his Islamic prayers and celebrating Islamic holidays while also meditating in the sacred places of the Javanese traditions when he wanted to make major decision.

On September 7, 1974, three months before the East Timor invasion, Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam met Suharto in a villa in Mt. Dieng, Java Island, where Suharto was meditating in the Semar Cave, which is named after a mythical Javanese character with whom Suharto identified. That cave is still regarded as sacred. When I visited in 2019 it was locked—the villa is now a museum where photos of the Suharto-Whitlam meeting are displayed. Showing a more open mind towards religious minorities, in 1978, Suharto created a directorate within the Ministry of Education and Culture to service these local religions, telling the Indonesian parliament, “These kepercayaan are part of our national tradition, and need not to be opposed to agama.”

The site of the Soeharto Whitlam meeting is now a museum. Image supplied by the author. Image supplied by the author. ©2020 Andreas Harsono/Human Rights Watch

Yet even under a strongman, the Ministry of Religious Affairs, technically in charge of religions, resisted and maintained its opposition to local religions. They have refused to include kepercayaan within their domain and have promoted the inclusion of these believers into monotheistic realms. One reason Muslim groups refuse to recognise kepercayaan is their concern that the percentage of Muslims (88 percent) in Indonesia may decline, threatening their majority status.

In Kuningan, the new atmosphere under Suharto prompted the Sunda Wiwitan to re-convert to their native faith. Some of them legally left the Catholic church. Some maintain the practice of two religions, living with multiple identities. In 1982, the faith registered with the Ministry of Education and Culture’s directorate, seeking government services along with President Suharto’s accommodation of ethnic believers.

During the weekend I spent talking with Kanti, Djati and other Sunda Wiwitan believers, young and old, women and men, I witnessed the pain of the discrimination they faced and the cost of religious intolerance to people full of tolerance themselves.

It is fascinating to see a small religion resisting the power of the state. While Suharto took some important steps to protect religious freedom, it would have been better still if he had shown the moral courage to rescind the blasphemy law and the idiosyncratic and dangerous definition of religion from the Sukarno era. Sadly, Suharto’s successors have also failed to find the necessary political will.

Post-Suharto Discrimination

Jarwan is the only Sundanese man who stays overnight to guard the Sunda Wiwitan tomb in Curug Goong. He is a well-built man, keeping a motorcycle and several guard dogs in the bamboo hut.

“Someone has to stay here,” he said. “I am the youngest of the elders.”

In July 2020, the Kuningan government sealed off the tomb, declaring that the Sunda Wiwitan group had no permit to build “a monument.” Dozens of Sunni Muslim militants accompanied government officials to seal the tomb, saying that “the monument” is idolatrous.

Sunda Wiwitan members argue that the construction is not a “monument” but rather a “tomb” prepared for two of their elders, Dewi Kanti’s parents, Pangeran Djati Kusumah, and Emalia Wigarningsih. “It’s built on their own land. There is no regulation here to ban anyone to have cemeteries on our own land,” Djati said.

This is not an unfamiliar scene in many Muslim-majority provinces in Indonesia. Rights monitors have recorded hundreds of incidents like this involving Sunni militant groups, whose thuggish harassment and assaults on houses of worship and members of religious minorities have become increasingly aggressive. Those targeted include Ahmadis, Christians, and Shia Muslims. To give just one grisly example, on May 13-14, 2018, Islamist suicide bombers  detonated explosives at three Christian churches in Surabaya. The bombings killed at least 12 and wounded at least 50 people. Thirteen suicide bombers also died.

In 2006 the government introduced regulations for building permits for houses of worship, prompting Muslim protesters to demand the closure of “illegal churches.” Hundreds of churches were closed. Some Christian congregations won lawsuits allowing them to build, but local governments simply ignored  court rulings. GKI Yasmin Protestant Church in Bogor was shut down in 2008. The congregation won the case at the Supreme Court in 2010 and then-President Yudhoyono asked the local government to reopen the church, but the city government defied the orders, without consequence.

By contrast, in 2010 the Religious Affairs Ministry listed 243,199 mosques throughout Indonesia, around 78 percent of all houses of worship. Recently an ongoing government census using drones and photography has registered at least 554,152 mosques, suggesting that the number of mosques has more than doubled in a decade.

The hardline Islamist preacher, Rizieq Shihab, has just returned to Indonesia from self-imposed exile in Saudi Arabia. He then called on his supporters “to behead blasphemers;” on November 27 an Islamist group attacked a village in Sigi, Sulawesi island, beheading a Salvation Army elder and three of his relatives. The attackers also burned a Salvation Army church and six other Christian-owned houses. No action has been taken against Rizieq for inciting violence, although police arrested him for breaking coronavirus restrictions.

Threats and speeches that incite violence are facilitated by Indonesia’s discriminatory laws and regulations. They give local majority religious populations significant leverage over religious minority communities. Compounding this, institutions including the Ministry of Religious Affairs, the Coordinating Board for Monitoring Mystical Beliefs in Society (Bakor Pakem) under the Attorney General’s Office, the Religious Harmony Forum, and the semi-official Indonesian Ulema Council have issued decrees and fatwas (religious rulings) against members of religious minorities, and frequently press for the prosecution of “blasphemers.”

Recent targets of the blasphemy law include three former leaders of the Gafatar religious community, prosecuted following the violent, forced eviction in 2016 of more than 7,000 members of the group from their farms on Kalimantan. A more prominent target was former Jakarta Governor Basuki “Ahok” Purnama, sentenced to a two-year prison term for blasphemy in a politically motivated case in May 2017. His longtime friend and ally, President Joko Widodo, simply stood by, afraid of the wrath of radical conservatives.

Violence against religious minorities and government failures to take decisive action negate guarantees of religious freedom in the Indonesian constitution and international law, including core international human rights conventions ratified by Indonesia. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Indonesia acceded to in 2005, provides that “persons belonging to…minorities shall not be denied the right, in community with the other members of their group, to enjoy their own culture, to profess and practice their own religion.”

Throughout there have been occasional and modest examples of progress. The Rotary Club began operating again in 1970 after Sukarno died. In 2000, President Abdurrahman Wahid, the eldest son of Hasjim Wahid, cancelled President Sukarno’s 1962 decree banning the Freemasons and alleged associate organisations. After more than a dozen members were detained under the law during the New Order, the Bahai community has since been able to revive their network; however, they have been denied permission to build a temple so they continue to worship in private homes.

A major reform took place in 2006 when President Yudhoyono signed the Population Administrative Law, which no longer requires kepercayaan believers to convert to official religions to be listed on ID cards. But many civil servants are still not aware of or ignore the law, so religious minorities face problems if they refuse to choose one of the six religions that these officials recognise. “They simply say you’re a godless woman if you want to keep the [religion] column blank,” said Kanti, whose ID card has a blank space after the word agama.

In Kuningan, Indonesia’s Ombudsman finally helped mediate the dispute between the Sunda Wiwitan community and the local government, prompting the local authorities to lift the seal on the site and permitting the group to continue constructing the tomb.

The Ombudsman’s Office also helped the Dayak Kaharingan, pressuring several local governments to drop decades of discrimination. Ombudsman Ahmad Suaedy said in a webinar: “The key issue is that they [local religious groups] should get public service. The religious minorities should take courage to report their difficulties.”

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In 2017, four Indonesian citizens petitioned the Constitutional Court, demanding the right to have their religions listed on their ID cards. They represented four Indigenous religions including the Marapu  (Sumba ), the Sapto Darmo (Java ), and the Parmalim and the Ugamo Bangsa Batak (Sumatra). On November 7, 2017, the court ruled in their favour.

But the Ulama Council objected to the decision. The Ministry of Home Affairs, which issues and manages ID cards, has since failed to implement the court decision. The Ulama Council argued that the ruling “hurts the feeling of the Islamic ummah,” but it is not clear on what legal grounds the ministry refuses to do its duty.

Separately, the Constitutional Court rejected three petitions to revoke the blasphemy law between 2009 and 2018, declaring that religious freedom was subject to certain limitations to preserve public order (former President Abdurrahman Wahid joined the lawsuit in 2009). Those limitations, the court stated in its 2010 decision, were to be defined by “religious scholars,” thereby outsourcing the rights of minorities to unelected members of the majority religion.

There are more than 180 ethnic-religious communities spanning from Sumatra to the smaller islands in eastern Indonesia. They are estimated to encompass around 10 to 12 million people, although the 2010 census recorded only 299,617 people or 0.13 percent of Indonesians claiming to be exclusively ethnic believers. It is still hard and even dangerous to publicly declare one’s religion in Indonesia.

Indeed, it is gruelling work to battle against both government officials and the Sunni ulama. Spineless politicians, feckless government bureaucrats, and narrow-minded ulama officials hamper the development of democracy and human rights in Indonesia.

Jarwan in Curug Goong knows very well that he cannot rely on the government or anyone else to protect the tomb he stands guard over. “We have seen this mistreatment and intimidation for decades. We must guard our sacred places ourselves.

The post Religious minorities in Indonesia face discriminiation appeared first on New Mandala.

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Governments around the world subsidise study abroad programs with various motives: to promote cultural exchange, contribute to the development of recipient countries, or create a network of future leaders as part of public diplomacy efforts. The internationalisation of higher education is also an integral part of the globalising economy and labour movements. These motives are easily understood if the education is funded by a government or institution of a developed country aiming to attract foreign nationals, typically those from developing countries.

When study-abroad programs are provided by a developing country for its own citizens, it is more difficult to pinpoint the necessity. LPDP, the Indonesian government’s flagship international scholarship program, and its scholarship recipients have intermittently come under pressure to justify their use of public funds. LPDP has sent a total of 24,929 Indonesians abroad for postgraduate education, more than 3,500 per year since 2013. The large number of LPDP recipients looks especially jarring when juxtaposed with the fact that only 9.4 percent of Indonesians aged over 25 had at least a bachelor’s degree in 2018, the lowest ratio in Southeast Asia.

Faced with limited public resources and under-achievements in inclusive education at home, LPDP recipients are constantly reminded not to waste the state funds. LPDP materials are replete with terms such as kontribusi (contribution) or pengabdian (serve the country)—essentially a call for the recipients to give back to their country. However, it is unclear how an LPDP recipient is supposed to pay the nation back for financing their higher education.

In this article, we outline two different rationales that commonly underpin the decision of governments from developing countries to provide international education to their citizens. These are the desire on one hand to invest in human capital and on the other the goal of promoting social justice and equitable access to opportunity, objectives that are to some degree inherently in tension with one another. While we try to locate LPDP in either rationale to interrogate the effectiveness of the policy, we find that LPDP presently is effective in promoting neither human capital nor social justice.

Investing in human capital

One of the most common rationales for financing study abroad is to invest in citizens with great potential, hoping that education in a developed country will grow their knowledge and talents for the sending countries to later reap. Like every investment, there is always a risk of loss. To send your finest individuals abroad is to entrust them to the host country’s custody: to believe in their management of your assets in exchange for paying an entry fee of tuition costs and transferring a (possibly high-income) consumer base. The quite literal return on investment is expected when these students come home after study with newly accumulated knowledge and skills.

Scholarship programs working in this investment paradigm understandably often have a return policy in place—to extend the analogy, this is perhaps equal to a deposit insurance scheme. Without a return policy, the sending country risks losing its investment if the students decide to settle abroad after study. Scholarship programs often require recipients to sign an agreement which stipulates the repayment of the scholarship in the event of non-return. In order to guarantee repayment ability, some programs require applicants to demonstrate the possession of assets equal in financial value to the scholarship fund as collateral or name several financial guarantors. Of course, the latter way of enforcing the return policy means that only people with considerable financial resources are able to apply.

Inequality of access, however, is a fundamental part of the investment model of funding higher education. Governments invest in individuals with the best academic achievements, many who would have benefitted from education in the best secondary schools in the country and a high-income family background. This combination of qualities, whether intentionally considered or not in scholarship selection, is viewed by many governments as likely to lead to the highest possibility of gain in terms of total accumulated knowledge and skills, economic resources, and networks that these individuals bring to the country of origin.

Ensuring that students return home after study might be effective in preventing brain drain, but it does not necessarily guarantee that the investment will pay off. Scholarship programs sometimes have an additional arrangement to connect returnees to the job market to ensure distribution according to their expertise. The Bolashak scholarship for Kazakhstanis, for example, requires applicants be employed and, after they graduate, to work for the same employer for five years. The requirement shows what scholarship as an investment basically is: an extravagant way of recruiting high-quality talent for an industry or public agencies. Indeed, scholarship as human capital investment probably makes the best sense when considered as a procurement of services. The government or the industry is the service user; the scholarship recipients are the providers.

Promoting social justice

The second rationale views higher education in terms of social justice and equity. Scholarships are a way to ensure that common citizens and people from disadvantaged groups can access quality education regardless of socioeconomic position. The paradigm is taken up by the Ford Foundation, for example, who focusses their mission on help peopling from marginalised groups access graduate programs despite age and geographical barriers. The scholarship aims to create new leaders who can bring social change in their communities.  In this case, the purpose of higher education is not so much to contribute to the national economy through the supposed multiplier effects of having highly-educated elites, but to give people their rightful share in education.

Brennan and Naidoo (2008) argue that actions from institutions and the government aiming for equity and social justice through higher education should cover two aspects: ensuring equal access to education and that graduates can participate in the workforce arena afterwards. However, they suggest that as long as social structures do not offer equal opportunities, students from disadvantaged groups will likely derive limited advantages in terms of social mobility after graduation—higher education credentials are only one factor in social mobility. This framework challenges the modern, common viewpoint that higher education can be a determining factor in improving social mobility through the production of new groups of elites.

Evaluating LPDP 

At first, the LPDP scholarships appear to employ an investment rationale. The stated objective of LPDP is to prepare Indonesia’s future leaders and professionals, and it also has a return policy. However, LPDP’s implementation seems to be incomplete. First, it does not have a mechanism to enforce the return policy. Scholarship recipients are required to sign a legally binding agreement to return to Indonesia after graduation and repay the scholarship amount upon violation. However, there is no rule on collateral and seemingly no effective monitoring of the graduates’ whereabouts. When graduates do return (LPDP reports only 1 percent of its graduates were given a warning to return in 2018), the program is not linked to the job market to ensure the relevant placement of graduates. In other words, there is a risk of loss in LPDP’s investment from non-return and unemployment.

LPDP, however, has a second stated objective: to ensure sustainable funding is available for the next generation’s education. To finance its programs, LPDP manages its own endowment fund which, in Indonesian, is called dana abadi, literally “eternal fund.” Considered together with its large number of recipients, this appears to signal LPDP’s recognition of the value of higher education as a need—something that should be enjoyed not by a few select individuals in hopes of the systemic change that these educated elites will bring, but by as many Indonesians as possible. It is as if LPDP is working to ensure that higher education becomes the generational difference between future and past Indonesians.

The paradigmatic differences between the two objectives are not easy to reconcile. Investing in too many individuals defeats the purpose of investing in the first place due to cost inefficiency. As an investment, LPDP would ideally limit its awards to fewer people while ensuring that these recipients possess not only huge intellectual capability but also a strong presence in their respective fields even before they embark on their journeys abroad. Upon their return, LPDP’s task is to trace, recruit and place these individuals in strategic professional or policy-making posts deserving of the “leaders” designation. The fewer number of awards also directly serves to facilitate locating and re-identification of recipients.

If this framework seems familiar, it is because this strategy was the basis of the New Order’s technocratic governance model, where an elite group of Western-educated economists were recruited to help the military-backed regime impose a grand plan of development. Arguably, the strategy depended heavily on the degree of control the regime had on the technocrats, something that gradually diminished to the point that the educated elites branched into two competing factions—the economists and the engineers—toward the end of Suharto’s rule.

Control is perhaps where LPDP’s nationalistic flavour comes from. The notions of kontribusi or pengabdian are evoked not because one cannot give back or serve the country from abroad. It is possible for the government to conceive a nationalist image for citizens working entirely abroad, as exemplified by the “foreign exchange hero” branding of Indonesia’s migrant workers. Rather, the non-returning recipients are branded as un-nationalist because they refuse to follow the path designated by the government. However, with the lack of monitoring and control over career choices, LPDP’s call to return and serve the country is weakly enforced.

Meanwhile, if international higher education is seen as a means to improve equality, it is redundant to try to control recipients’ choices after they graduate or to quantify contribution in monetary terms. The redistributive aim of social justice is achieved for every unit of public resources spent on the education of a citizen who would otherwise not be able to afford it.

If LPDP chooses to see higher education as a basic need, the program would ideally set as its goal the proliferation of as many highly educated Indonesians as possible. But until 2019, LPDP distributed scholarship funding mostly to science and technology study programs and deprioritised social sciences study programs. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, LPDP recently adjusted its policy to accept applications for all study programs but remains limited to so-called “leading world universities” mainly in the US and UK.

LPDP can more efficiently deliver on its promise to leverage the demographic bonus if it targets people from disadvantaged groups who can bring long-term impacts directly to their community after graduation. Although it does have an affirmative program specifically for this purpose, eligibility is given solely to the populations of underdeveloped and remote districts, overlooking the multifaceted nature of deprivation. The program should ideally consider other inequity aspects such as poverty and gender barriers.

LPDP has unquestionably realised life-changing educational experiences for thousands of young Indonesians and holds the door open for thousands more. For possibly the first time in Indonesian history, a government program has promised a continuous supply of highly educated individuals for the foreseeable future. However, as is the case with all public programs, resources are not infinite and effectiveness is always a looming question. With a lack of serious enforcement and specific policies to promote either the human capital or social justice objectives, LPDP has yet to excel in any of the goals it has set for itself.

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