Kalla's democracy and Golkar ...

Democracy

Vice President Jusuf Kalla, also the general chairman of the country’s largest political party, Golkar, made another controversial statement recently when he said, democracy is a tool and not an objective in itself.

And as a tool, it can be put aside or even replaced, he said before members and leaders of Golkar when referring to efforts to improve people’s welfare.

In less than 24 hours the statement drew a lot of reactions, mostly regretting his simplistic point of view because—to many political analysts, observers and activists in the country—democracy is something they were fighting for so many years. It was not until about 10 years ago that Indonesia managed to call itself one of the biggest democracies in the world.

Therefore, to them, democracy is not just a tool, not even a mere “noun”. It implies leadership, courage, creativity, open-mindedness and ability to see an opportunity (and eventually power)—for the welfare of the majority of the people.

Therefore, it was rather surprising that Kalla described democracy simply as a tool in his capacity as the general chairman of Golkar, a political party which might not have survived the tumultuous late 90s if it was not because of the eagerness of the country’s political elites to support the basic principles of democracy.

However, we can also try to understand his statement. It was uttered amidst the country’s continuous political bickering that many parties simply forget their noble tasks of improving the welfare of the people (or at least those who have been supporting them)—a situation which actually has prompted many people to also say that Indonesian democracy is still “low” in terms of quality.

So probably it was something said out of Kalla’s frustration.

But frustration or not, at least Kalla had urged us—as a nation—to have a look again at “our democracy” especially because in a matter of months we are going to celebrate the 10^th anniversary of our reform era.

We believe it is high time we have a very close look at our tool again because even a tool sometimes needs fine-tuning just like a knife which needs to be regularly sharpened.

As one wise man said: Our biggest challenge actually is not how to promote democracy, but how to check it.