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Origins of Media Controls 23

sympathetic students. During a visit by the Japanese prime minister, Kakuei Tanaka,
in January 1974, thousands of students protested the rising cost of living, corruption,
predatory foreign investment, and cronyism. Called the “Disaster of 15 January,” or
“Malari,” the demonstrations became riots that destroyed hundreds of buildings and
left at least eleven people dead.
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The regime’s subsequent repression began a step-by-step depoliticization of civil
society, largely through measures that closed off or co-opted the available channels
for criticism. Early in his honeymoon period, Suharto had moved preemptively, resur-
recting the Sukarno-era Anti-Subversion Law that defined subversion as any “action
[that] could distort, undermine or deviate from the ideology of Pancasila or the Broad
Outlines of State Policy, or otherwise destroy or undermine the power or the author-
ity of the lawful government or the machinery of the State, or disseminate feelings of
hostility or arouse hostility, disturbances or anxiety among the population.” Such
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broad strictures effectively criminalized all critical reporting and most public debate.
Following Malari, the regime dismissed officials accused of inciting the students and
filed criminal charges against hundreds of civilians.
Suharto also punished the print press by closing twelve news publications, includ-
ing Indonesia Raya . While several newspapers had been critical of corruption and
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government policy, their gravest transgression in the Malari incident was exposing
intraelite divisions. Suharto responded by preventing such divisions from reaching
the public in the future. With the 1974 media crackdown, John Bresnan notes, the
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country lost “a valuable source of information that helped the government to track the
outcomes of its policies and articulated and projected elite opinion during a period in
which no other institutions were doing so.”
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In 1975, Suharto continued to depoliticize society while further weakening oppo-
sition parties by introducing a “floating mass” policy restricting subregional party
activity and limiting the rural population’s role in politics to just voting. The logic,
Cribb and Brown explain, was to protect people from becoming “distracted from the
tasks of national development . . . so that they would be fully responsive to govern-
ment instruction and advice.” A.S. Hikam adds that the policy also aimed to “protect
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the people from political manipulation by competing parties” and a return to Sukarno-
era divisiveness.
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By requiring permits for gatherings of over five people, the regime made political
rallies outside state control virtually impossible. The government further restricted
political parties by limiting issues they could raise and appointing an electoral com-
mission to review campaign materials. Finally, parties had to submit candidate lists to
the commission for approval.
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Even before this forced depoliticization, elements of the media felt that respon-
sibility for representing citizens had shifted to them. As the daily Harian Kami put it,
“[W]hat is expected from the press is to function as a ‘parliament outside the parlia-
ment.’” Dhakidae takes this further, explaining that print press efforts to expose
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state corruption in Suharto’s first years “represented a last ditch defence of the society
in a self-imposed task of redefining the interest of a nation in the absence of political
parties.” In other words, as the legislature lost its ability to check the executive and
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opposition parties lost the ability to compete fairly in elections, the media became the
last institutional vehicle of political contestation.
For four years following Malari, surviving news outlets, though more cautious,
managed to retain a critical perspective through favorable coverage of protests by
students who were angered by economic mismanagement and fraud in Suharto’s