Anto Mohsin's "Electrifying Indonesia"

Anto Mohsin is an assistant professor in residence in the liberal arts program at Northwestern University in Qatar and an affiliated faculty member of Northwestern University’s Science in Human Culture program in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development, and reported the following:

When browsers open my book to page 99, they will read something that doesn’t immediately seem to have anything to do with electrification. There are three paragraphs on this page. The first paragraph recounts a brief history of oil exploration and exploitation in Indonesia to provide a context of the country’s oil production and the windfall profits that the Indonesian government derived from selling crude oil to the global market. The second paragraph details how the revenues from the oil sale were used, among other things, to subsidize oil prices for domestic consumptions. The resulting “cheap oil” and the country-wide network of oil delivery infrastructure were used to power numerous diesel-fueled power plants (DPPs). Finally, the last paragraph discusses the Indonesian state-owned electric company (Perusahaan Listrik Negara or PLN)’s financial and technical rationale in choosing DPPs as their main technological choice of providing electricity in many areas in the country. By the end of the 1990s, thousands of DPPs dotted Indonesia’s map and without which electricity would only be available in urban areas and selected regions.

The information on page 99 is part of chapter 4 titled “Java-Centrism and the Two Grid Systems” in which I discuss how the Indonesian New Order government (1966-1998) focused on the construction of Indonesia’s electric infrastructure in Java by building the country’s first sophisticated island-wide power grid. Elsewhere outside this heavily populated island, the New Order regime installed DPPs, which were not all networked into one system, but nonetheless formed a “grid” since they were run by PLN. These two grids made up the electric landscape of Indonesia and remains largely so to this day.

Browsers will notice that Ford’s Page 99 Test doesn’t quite work with my book. Indonesia’s brief history of fossil fuel extraction at the top of this page belies the subject of the book, which is about the sociopolitical history of electrification in the country. For Indonesia, natural resource extraction is, of course, connected with electrification, but it is not the central argument of the book.

Succinctly, the book argues that the provision of electricity in New Order Indonesia was made available to citizens in exchange for supporting the government electorally and politically. Electorally, electrifying villages helped “electrify,” so to speak, villagers to come out and cast their votes for the government-backed political party Golkar. Politically, bringing electricity to the rural areas helped support the New Order government’s development agenda to create a Pancasila society (i.e., a just society based on the ideals of the state ideology). Although the New Order government managed to gain the electoral support that it sought (Golkar always won most votes during the general elections), it fell short of achieving “social justice for all Indonesians” through electrification.

PLN tried its best to marshal its limited resources to bring electricity to the masses. Building DPPs was one of its efforts to do so. However, its maneuverability was constrained since it had to answer to the government who used electricity and other promised material benefits to create a patron-client relationship with the populace.

Nation building, national development, and social justice are the three themes that the book addresses. More Indonesians today have recognized the importance of electricity in their lives and in the life of the nation. As such, the Indonesian people have increasingly been exerting their voices in the country’s development projects including electrification. This is a far cry from being a passive citizenry when they were mostly treated as the recipients of government handouts. However, it remains to be seen how the relationship between electricity and social justice will unfold in the future.

Learn more about Electrifying Indonesia at the University of Wisconsin Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue