State speech for peripheral publics in Java

Since the 1965 bloodbath which ended its failed experiment with constitutional democracy, Indonesia has been ruled by a highly centralized, military-dominated government which has moved unilaterally to modernize the country's economic infrastructure and indoctrinate Indonesians into the ways and sentiments of its own version of nationalism. This self-named New Order has quashed all opposition to its top-down implementation of policies which have, among other goals, the national integration of rural .communities like those in south-central Java which I discuss here.l A self-legitimizing modernist ideology has licensed the New Order's self-assumed^right to oversee "development" Qtembangunan) and "improvement" Qtembinaan)" of the lot of Indonesia's vast, heterogeneous peasantry, and has underwritten as well the perceived superiority of state officials. "All Indonesians I have ever met," one outspoken Indonesian intellectual has commented, "feel that they are the subordinates (bawahan) of the government. Moreover there are very many of our officials in the regions or outlying areas who feel confident that they really are the superiors (atasan) of the people."