Thousands gathered in Jakarta against the Indonesian government’s new legislation which imposes ban on premarital sex, insulting the President and a wave of other restrictions.
Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority nation and the third largest democracy last week, banned sex outside marriage in a sweeping new criminal law that also imposed
hefty penalties for a string of other offences, such as insulting the president. The new law, passed unanimously, criminalized extramarital sex and cohabitation for locals and foreigners, punishable by prison terms.
Indonesia has been a curious case most of the time. Since the end of the three-decade-long rule of Suharto, it evolved into a multiparty democracy. Even during Suharto’s development dictatorship, it was, on most accounts, if not liberal, a quasi-liberal autocracy. At the height of the debate over Islam’s compatibility with democracy, it has often been cited to debunk the critics.
However, over the ensuing decades, Islamist orthodoxy displaced political moderation, encroaching on the political mainstream.
Any pretence of religious tolerance took a mighty blow when Jakarta’s Christian governor was found guilty and sentenced to jail over blasphemy charges after a campaign by the Islamic zealots.
One might dismiss Indonesia’s democratic decline as a predictable, inevitable clash between liberal freedoms and religious fundamentalism fought more profoundly in the Islamic world than anywhere. However, Indonesia is not unique in its liberal democratic decay. The rise of democracy worldwide happened in three waves, the first dating back to the 19th century, the second after the end of World War II and the third in the 70s. However, though the countries in the first two waves, fewer in number, mainly in Europe and North America, evolved into liberal democracies, the majority of countries of the larger third wave got stuck in the middle in their transition to liberal democracies. As a result, a major gap exists between electoral democracies, i.e. political systems which elect political leaders through some form of competitive elections, and liberal democracies, i.e. political systems that combine free elections with a liberal state order that upholds fundamental rights and
civil liberties.
The number of liberal democracies peaked at 42 in 2012 and declined to 34 in 2022, according to Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem), a Swedish research institute. Similarly, the number of people living in electoral democracies plummeted from 3.9 billion to 2.3 billion between 2017 and 2021.
During the same years, the number of people living in liberal democracies fell from 1.2 billion to 1 billion.
Some of these, though, need to be taken with a pinch of salt. For instance, V-Dem ranks India as an electoral autocracy, a bit of a stretch, which may happen when you listen too much of the echo chamber of sour grapes emanating from fierce domestic political competition.
However, the decline of the liberal credentials of the states is undisputable, be it in the established liberal democracies such as Italy, which has elected neo-Nazi Brothers of Italy to government or America, where Republican politics echoes more of their slave-owning forefathers. Liberalism’s decline in the West is mainly a result of social polarization, more than anything else, due to the real and perceived economic displacement of the white working class.
But, that is not necessarily the driver of the illiberal trend in this part of the world, where societies were not liberal democracies in its classical definition but entailed a degree of pluralistic values.
Electoral democracies become illiberal democracies when elections empower a vast swath of the illiberal population. Such societies produce electoral outcomes, which are a harbinger of the illiberal transformation of society. However, that can not explain the sudden retreat of liberal traits from societies which happened to be electoral democracies, be it the islamization of Bangladesh or Indonesia or the rise of Hindutva right in India. A sense of economic and political disillusionment and active religious proselytization, of course played a part. And disillusionment can easily be expressed in democratic societies, often leading to advocating ideas that conflict with fundamental freedoms.
That might explain Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s electoral advent, feeding off the popular discontent and his presidential victory, highlighting the ‘otherness’ of the ethnic minorities.
The political leaders also find it electorally advantageous to appease the illiberal conservatism in the society- just like the two main Sinhalese political parties had regularly kowtowed before ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks or the Tamil leadership embraced Dravidian political exclusivism.
Sinhala Buddhist nationalism has opposed previous efforts at a political solution to Tamil political aspirations. However, whether acceding to those demands would necessarily make Sri Lanka more liberal is a different question. (In the same way, the liberal character of the Sri Lankan state might not be enhanced or ensured by making it into a federal state. If anything, Ethiopia is a lesson on how the promise of ethnic federalism could go terribly wrong when foisted on fiercely completive demographics.)
Has Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, the dominant ethnic-nationalist trait of the Sri Lankan state, procrastinated Sri Lanka’s liberal democratic transition? It might not have dictated how people dress or eat or governed their affairs in the bedroom; however, the all-encompassing shadow of Sinhala Buddhist conservatism has dissuaded liberal reforms. Politicians who might have legislated to decriminalize homosexuality dreaded the conservative religious backlash. Economic reforms also attract criticism from the clergy- Cardinal Malcolm Ranjit has cautioned ‘nightlife would destroy our culture.’
The greatest bulwark against a illiberal society, ethnic and religious fanatics and otherworldly clergy is the strengthening of independent democratic institutions of the state that could uphold fundamental rights and arbitrage disputes between its key stakeholders.
However, populist politicians, who relied on illiberal societies to climb the ladder to electoral office, have often dismantled these independent institutions, just like Gotabaya Rajapaksa did under the 20th amendment to the Constitution.
As Sri Lankans are lumbering in the economic crisis, they have also come to senses. The usual conspiracy theorists and racist dog-whistlers have retreated. This is also the time to rebuild the liberal attributes of the state, enshrine the fundamental rights of all people, of the marginalized and sexual minorities and empower independent institutions. President Ranil Wickremesinghe has projected himself as a liberal democrat; he now has an opportunity to recast the Sri Lankan state in those lines. He should hurry because sooner or later, the usual culprits would hijack the national discourse and defile it.
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