Yesterday, India observed Republic Day, celebrating the 61st anniversary of the date its Constitution came into force. The chief guest at India’s first Republic Day on January 26, 1950 had been the then-Indonesian President Sukarno whom India’s Prime Minister at the time, Jawaharlal Nehru, supported during Indonesia’s struggle for freedom from the Netherlands. In 2011, 61 years later, India hosted a second Indonesian President, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, as the chief guest of its Republic Day celebrations. While demonstrating support for anti-colonialism was no longer the motive, India’s choice represents the growing economic and strategic importance of Indonesia in South East Asia.
Indonesia is the third biggest democracy in the world after the United States and India as well as the third fastest growing economy in Asia after China and India. Indonesia’s economic relevance to India can be gauged from the comments of India’s former Ambassador to Indonesia, Shyam Saran, who noted, “(t)oday India needs to make relations with Indonesia the centerpiece of its Look East policy.” His comments went beyond the economy, however, and also touched on strategic and defensive issues:
“Asia is home to several emerging and globalizing powers, including India, China and Indonesia. An important consequence of this is the increasing density of maritime communications from the Pacific to the Indian Oceans in which all major Asian powers have a growing stake. Given their location and capabilities, India and Indonesia have a critical role in guarding these vital lifelines. This is important for their security. It will also enable them to play a key role together in shaping the emerging security architecture in the region.”
China, for its part, has also been very proactive in attempting to garner Indonesia’s approval. Premier Wen Jiabao had to cancel a trip to the country in 2010 following the April earthquake but President Hu Jintao made up for it by meeting with Yudhoyono at the G20 meeting in Toronto in June 2010. Perhaps more importantly, China has put its money where its mouth is by announcing that Beijing would invest $6.6 billion in infrastructure improvements in Indonesia.
The United States has of course recognized that the battle for dominance in Asia is well and truly on and is also right in the middle of the competition to woo Indonesia. President Obama visited Jakarta during his Asia trip in November 2010 and although he stated the United States was not involved in “containing” China, he poured on the charm by reminiscing about his four years in Indonesia as a boy, called Indonesia a “critical partner” of the United States and stressed that “the United States and Indonesia are bound together by shared interests and shared values.”
Despite these advances by the major powers of the world, it is unlikely that Indonesia will align itself explicitly with any one of these suitors. Indonesia wishes to pursue an independent foreign policy, promoting dynamic equilibrium in the South East Asia. Its official stance on United States and China is best summarized by Juwono Sudarsono, Indonesia’s defense minister under Mr. Yudhoyono from 2004 to 2009:
“We want to maintain a strategic space from the rivalry between the United States and China. We can navigate between that rivalry, from time to time giving out signals that both the United States and China are important to us, because if we align ourselves too closely, it would be detrimental to the core values of Indonesia’s foreign policy.”
We can thus look forward to a fascinating battle over Indonesia; one that will only get more interesting as the country continues to make rapid economic strides and aims to assert its own independent foreign policy.
