POLITICS IN SIMALUNGUN:

A Study in Political Integration

A DISSERTATION
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

BY
R. William Liddle

1967
 SUMMARY

The problem of political integration in a new state is explored through an

analysis of political leadership and organization in the regency of Simalungun
and its central city of Pematangsiantar in North Sumatra, Indonesia. Political
integration is defined as including (1) a vertical dimension, which involves the
closing of the gap between an urban, Western-educated, nationalist political
elite and the largely traditional, rural population and (2) a horizontal
dimension, which involves a meshing together of disparate social groups
within a framework of national loyalties and institutions
The population of Simalungun is divided into four ethnic and two
religious groups. The Simalungun Bataks, indigenous to the region, are mostly
Protestants, live in rural villages and engage in swidden agriculture. The South
Tapanuli Bataks are Moslems, town-dwellers and engaged in trade or white-
collar occupations. The Protestant North Tapanuli Batak group includes a
substantial urban population and a rural population of wet-rice farmers. The
non-devout Moslem Javanese, imported to Simalungun as plantation laborers,
remain on or near the plantations. Plantation workers (mostly Javanese) and
illegal squatters on plantation lands (North Tapanuli Bataks and Javanese)
constitute a significant socioeconomic group among whom a sense of common
interests is emerging.
Of the five major political parties in Simalungun in the POStindenendence
period, four have been local branches of national organizations. The two major
religious parties have become closely tied to the interests of particular ethnic
groups: Masjumi (Moslem with South Tapanuli Bataks, and Parkindo
(Protestant) with North Tapanuli Bataks. Because of the strength of ethnic-
relizious ties, and their easy convertibility into aartisan loyalties, the religious
parties have not developed complex organizational structures. The two major
secular parties, PNI (Nationalist) and PKI (Communist), lacking this
advantage, have attempted to build support among plantation workers and
squatters regardless of ethnic-religious background. Because of the fragility
of:loyalties based on socioeconomic interests the secular parties have
developed highly complex, hierarchical, well-articulated organizational
structures.
The Simalungun Bataks supported a purely local ethnic political
organization in the 1950s; in recent years they have not been affiliated with
any party.
The impact of the party system, and of the larger Indonesian political
environment, has been generally dysfunctional for the creation of an integrated
political system. Masjumi and Parkindo have tended to exacerbate deep-rooted
primordial cleavages, and the PNI and PKI have in large measure failed to
inculcate supra- ethnic partisan loyalties. Although the parties have provided
an institutional network linking Simalungun to the national political process,
several factors--the nature of party ideologies, organization and leadership, the
decline of the parties as authoritative decision-makers--have combined to limit
the local-national integrative capacity of the party system.
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .....................................iv
INTRODUCTION ..........................................1
I. CONTEMPORARY SIMALUNGUN/SIANTAR: AN OVERVIEW . • 11
PART ONE: SOCIO-POLITICAL CHANGE IN SIEALUNGUN
II. TRADITIONAL GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY IN SIMALUNGUN 54
III. T-TR COLONIAL PERIOD ...........................76
IV. JAPANESE OCCUPATION AND NATIONALIST REVOLUTION . . . 116
PART TWO: CONTEMPORARY POLITICS IN
SIMALUNGUN/SIANTAR
V. THE PARTY SYSTEM AND THE GOVERNMENTAL PROCR.SS. • 150
0. THE LOCAL PARTIES: OBJECTIVES, STRATEGIES AND
ORGANIZATION................................................................................................ 1 8 5
VI. BASES OF PARTISAN SUPPORT: VOTERS, MEMBERS AND
LEADERS ........................................................................................................ 2 2 9
I. P A R T Y LE AD P R SR I P : RECRUITMENT AN D LI N K A GE . • • • 2 7 7
II. P A T T E R N S O F I N T R A - P A R T Y F A C T I O N A L I S M ............... 3 2 8
III. SUKU SIMALUNGUN: AN ETHNIC GROUP IN SEARCH OF
REPRESENTATION ........................................................................................ 3 8 6
VII. LOCAL POLITICS AND POLITICAL INTEGRATION: AN
EVALUATION................................................................................................... 4 2 0
FOOTNOTES............................................................................................ 448

BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................... 484

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A doctoral dissertation is the product of many influences, intellectual and

personal, reaching back at least to the experiences of undergraduate days. It is
appropriate, therefore, to begin by expressing appreciation to Yale University,
where I was privileged to be both an undergraduate and a graduate student,
and to Yale's Directed Studies, Divisional Honors Major II (Political and
Economic Institutions) and political science graduate programs. To thank a
university and its programs is in reality to thank its faculty; I would like to
mention in particular David J. Braybrooke, Robert A. Dahl, Herbert S.
Kaufman, No J. Lederer and Charles E. Lindblom. In different combinations
all of these individuals provided intellectual stimulation, moral support and
personal friendship. Professors Kaufman and Dahl should perhaps be further
singled out, as it was they who first urged upon me a career in political
science.
As a graduate student associated with the Yale Southeast Asia Studies
program I benefitted greatly from exposure to the methods and concerns of
scholars in other disciplines concerned with the problems of change and
development in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. In anthropology, I learned much
from Gerald C. Hickey; in economics, from Douglas Paauw; and in history,
from Harry J. Benda. Also much appreciated was the kindness, patience and
skill of Kr. and Mrs. Abdul who taught me the Indonesian language.
Harry Benda's contributions to this dissertation go far beyond his formal
role as a teacher of modern Indonesian history. From the prospectus stage to
completion, Professor Benda responded to every query and made valuable
comments and criticisms on every chapter. His continuing support and concern
were especially valuable in those dark days when the field notes seemed to
defy analysis. If more of his suggestions had been adopted, the final product
would undoubtedly be better. For valuable advice at critical points during the
writing, appreciation is also due to Joseph LaPalombara and Robert O. Tilman
of Yale University, John R. W. Small of the University of Wisconsin, and
Bradley Richardson and John Orbell of The Ohio State University.
 For help with the statistical analyses in Chapter VII, I am indebted to
Joseph T. Crymes. Most of the tables were originally prepared by my wife,
who also provided trenchant criticism of writing style and organization.
Field work in Simalungun/Slantar in 1963-64 was made possible by a
grant from the Ford Foundation. For a year at the University of Chicago
(1964-65) as a Carnegie Fellow of the Committee for the Comparative Study
of New Nations, I am grateful to the Committee, the Carnegie Foundation and
to Aristide Zolberg, Morris Janowitz and Clifford Geertz, who commented on
various sections of Part One. Beyond his specific comments, Prof. Geertz'
brilliant analyses of many aspects of Indonesian social and political life and
his general discussions of the probleMs of new states have constituted the
single most influential source for my own analysis of politics in
Simalungun/Siantar.
In many respects my deepest debt is to the people of Simalungun/Siantar--
politicians, civil servants, urbanites and villagers--who were willing to give
freely of their time and energy to provide information and hospitality to the
foreigner in their midst. A special note of thanks must be offered to the
members of marga Purba whose hospitality included the induction of a
sibontar mata into the marga, and to the members of marga Sitolubatu, whose
kindnesses were many and whose friendship will never be forgotten.
Finally, I would like to thank my parents, whose contributions have taken
many forms. Despite misgivings and reservations about their son's choice of a
career and his desire to travel to the far ends of the earth, their love and
support has been unstintingly given.
Whatever merits this study may have are thus the result of a collaboration
in the broadest sense; its deficiencies, on the other hand, are my responsibility
alone.

R. William Liddle
Columbus, Ohio March 18, 1967
 INTRODUCTION
AN APPROACH TO THE STUDY OF
LOCAL POLITICS. IN A NEW STATE

"One of the most serious problems facing the postrevolutionary

Indonesian political elite has turned out to be the maintenance of mutual
understanding between themselves and the mass of the peasant population.
The attempt to build up a modern national state out of a plurality of distinct
regional cultures has been hampered by the difficulty of communication
between people still largely absorbed in those cultures and the metropolitan-
based nationalist leadership more oriented to the international patterns of
intelligentsia culture common to ruling groups in all the new Bandung
countries....
"In such a situation, the individuals and groups who can communicate
both with the urban elite and with the rural followers of a particular local
tradition perform an altogether critical function. It is these groups and
individuals who can 'translate' the somewhat abstract ideologies of the 'New
Indonesia' into one or another of the concrete idioms of rural life and can, in
return, make clear to the intelligentsia the nature of the peasantry's fears and
aspirations. Analyses of the creation of viable nations in Asia and Africa which
simply focus on the political elite, as those of political scientists have tended
to do, or simply on the peasant village, as those of anthropologists have tended
to do, are necessarily incomplete. What is needed, in addition, is an analysis of
the links between the two---i.e., of regional leadership.
A vigorous, imaginative regional leadership, able to play a cultural
middleman role between peasant and metropolitan life, and so create an
effective juncture between traditional cultural patterns and modern ones, is in
many ways the most essential prerequisite for the success, in democratic form,
of the nationalist experiment both in Indonesia and elsewhere."
Clifford Geertz, “The Javanese Kijaji: The Changing Role of a Cultural
Broker,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. II, No. 2, pp. 228-
229.
Within the discipline of political science the study of comparative politics
has been immensely enriched and expanded in recent years by the growth of
interest in the politics of the newly-independent states of Asia and Africa.
New theoretical approaches and concepts, many of them borrowed from
other disciplines, cross-national quantitative analyses, elite studies, studies of
whole political systems or of particular structures such as parties, armies or
bureaucracies, have made major contributions to our understanding of political
life not only within the new states but as a universal Phenomenon. In most of
these studies the basic unit of analysis--sometimes explicitly chosen, often
only implicit-- has been the independent nation-state, its creation, its
developmental Problems, the characteristics of its political and governmental
structures and personnel in comparison with those of the older nations of
Europe and America, and so on.
Along with this expansion of the field of comparative politics there has
emerged a small body of studies dealing with local government and politics in
the new states. In large part these works have not been set within the frame-
work of the whole political system--the nation-state--and its problems, but
rather have confined their perspective to the analysis of a locality per se.1
In the light of the prominence attached in the theoretical literature to the
problems of "nation-building," of the "part-whole" relationship and the "gap"
between local andn ational political life, this neglect is surprising. Edward
Shits, for example, has written that "In almost every aspect of their social
structures, the societies on which the new states must be based are
characterized by a 'gap.' It is the gap between the few, very rich and the mass
of the poor, between the educated and uneducated, between the townsman and
the villager, between the cosmopolitan or national and the local, between the
modern and the traditional, between the rulers and the ruled. It is the 'gap'
between a small group of active, aspiring, relatively well-off, educated and
influential persons in the big towns and an inert or indifferent, impoverished,
uneducated and relatively powerless peasantry."2 Clearly, there is much to
learn about the present condition and future potentialities of the nation-state
systems of Asia and Africa through analyses which focus on the nature and
extent of this gap and on the political structures and elites which may or may
not serve to bridge it. In particular, it would seem that the creation of effective,
stable and democratic political systems, and perhaps of the necessary
conditions for economic development as well, depends to a significant extent
on the achievement of at least a minimum of communication and articulation
between the national elites and the various sub-national strata only recently
brought within the nation-state framework.
Political integration, a concept which has become of increasing
importance in the field of political change and development, provides the basic
analytic framework within which this study is set.3 In our formulation, the
concept includes two major dimensions or axes: (1) a vertical dimension,
which we may call local-national political integration, which involves the
closing of the cultural and political gap between an urban, Western-educated,
nationalist political elite on the one hand and the masses of the largely tradi-
tional and rural population on the other; and (2) a horizontal dimension, which
involves a meshing together of disparate social groups--kinship, ethnic,
linguistic, religious, racial, socio-economic—within a framework of national
loyalties and institutions.4 In the older nations of Western Europe and North
America (with some important exceptions) these processes are substantially
complete; in the newer states of Asia and Africa they are barely underway.
Successful political integration, in both of its dimensions, requires the
development of supra-local loyalties, that is, loyalties which can transcend the
former parochial or primordial ties to village, clan, tribe or kingdom and
comprehend all of the peoples and territories of the new nation. It also requires
the development of supra-local political institutions--government
bureaucracies, political parties and interest groups--which can provide
effective channels of communication between those who make authoritative
decisions for the whole society, the national political elite, and those who are
affected by the decisions, the predominantly rural masses.5 The integrative
role of regional political leadership, culturally as well as in terms of
organization halfway between elite and mass, has been much neglected in the
recent literature on political development. As Clifford Geertz has so concisely
stated, however, a vigorous regional leadership which serves as a link between
the national political elite and the citizenry, translating the symbols, policies
and programs of the center into village terms and transmitting popular
demands and aspirations to the national policy-makers, is crucial to the
success of the integrative experiment, both in Indonesia and elsewhere in the
world of newly-emergent states.
There have been to date few scholarly works dealing with the integrative
or "part-whole" problem in Indonesia. Political studies, including the works of
J.D. Legge6 and Gerald S. Maryanov,7 have concentrated largely on legal-for-
mal aspects of governmental decentralization or on the national-level conflict
within the political elite over the centralization-decentralization issue. For our
purposes, the contributions of cultural anthropologists to a deeper exploration
of part-whole relationships in contemporary Indonesia have been more useful-
than the rather narrowly- conceived political-governmental analyses. Most
notably we have benefitted from the work of Clifford Geertz,8 Hildred
Geertz,9 Edward M. Bruner10 and G. William Skinner et al.,11 all of whom
have dealt with the problems of cultural integration and the relationship of
particular sub-groups and strata to the broader Indonesian society which is in
process of formation.
 In some respects Indonesia's integrative problems are less severe than
those of other new nations.12 Unlike neighboring Malaysia, Indonesia is not
divided racially, although it contains minority communities of Chinese,
Indians and others; unlike India, Indonesia has not been divided over the
question of language--the national language, bahasa Indonesia, is the property
of no single group and is spoken as a second language throughout the
archipelago; unlike Pakistan, separated into eastern and western regions by
more than a thousand miles of India, the Indonesian archipelago from Sabang
to the northern tip of Sumatra to Merauke on the southeastern edge of West
Irian is a contiguous territory. Moreover, the commitment to national
independence pervaded all levels of Indonesian society during the long years
of Revolution from 1945 to 1949 and has served as a powerful cohesive force.
On the other hand, Indonesia shares many of the malintegrative
characteristics of other new nations. Its boundaries, and indeed the very idea
of an Indonesian nation- state, are a creation of Dutch colonialism. Ethnically,
Indonesia contains over three hundred different groups speaking more than
two hundred and fifty distinct languages,13 of which at least ten number one
million or more members, of these the Javanese, comprising perhaps forty
million of a total Indonesian population of slightly over one hundred million,
are by far the largest group. Religion is also a divisive factor. Although over
ninety percent of the population is Moslem, only a fraction of the Moslem
community has been committed to the realization of an Islamic state; another
group, led by such secular nationalist (but nominally Moslem) leaders as
Sukarno, has firmly opposed Islamic political influence. The Christian
minority has also been an active defender of its position in the political arena.
Regionalism has also been of major significance in Indonesian politics,with
the peoples of the foreign exchange producing Outer Islands (most notably
Sumatra, Borneo, the Celebes and the Moluccas) in opposition to the foreign
exchange consuming Javanese. Finally, the communications network, although
on the whole more helped than hindered by the island nature of the country,
has suffered from the general lack of economic development and the broad
expanse (over three thousand miles from east to west) of Indonesian territory.
What, then, in the light of these problems, is the nature of the political
relationship between the village and Djakarta? What kinds of organizations,
what types of leaders, have emerged to link the countryside with the national
political system of which it is a part? On what basis have regional leaders
cultivated and obtained, or failed to obtain, the support of the populace? How
have the villagers related themselves to each other and to the political system
of independent Indonesia? In an attempt to find answers to these questions,
this study presents a picture of one area, the regency of Simalungun and its
central city, the municipality of Pematangsiantar, and of the development of
political structures and leadership in that region.
The regency of Simalungun and the (administratively separate) city of
Pematangsiantar, located in the province of North Sumatra, provide an
excellent setting for an examination of the integrative problem in Indonesia.
While no single regency or town can typify the immense diversity that
characterizes contemporary Indonesia, Simalungun society is in itself so
diverse that in a sense it is a microcosm of all-Indonesian politics. Several
subdistricts (the administrative level below the regency) of Simalungun are
characterized by a multiplicity of ethnic and religious groups, a plantation-
based economy and large numbers of illegal squatters on plantation land,
variables which may be found singly or in combination in other parts of the
archipelago as well. In the highland area of the regency one ethnic group, the
Simalungun Batak, predominates; in this region, less detraditionalized than
any other part of Simalungun, the economy is based largely on subsistence dry
rice agriculture. This pattern is also a common one, particularly in the Outer
Islands of Indonesia. Pematangsiantar, an administrative and commercial
center with a fast-growing multi-ethnic population, is in many respects typical
of urban development in Indonesia.
Beyond this internal diversity which permits valuable comparisons as to
the nature and extent of political change in subdistricts dominated by
plantations, in an urban environment and in a more traditional area,
Simalungun/Siantar is perhaps most fascinating to the student of political
development because of the enormous variety of cleavages which exist there.
Ethnicity (the population is divided into four major indigenous ethnic groups,
plus the Ohinese14), religion (Moslem, Protestant, Oatholic and animist),
economic groups (urban and plantation workers, plantation squatters, traders, a
white collar class, farmers), and ideological cleavages related to the national
party system and to the struggle for independence all provide grounds on
which men differ in their values, their attitudes toward politics and
government and the goals for which they wage political combat. Detailed
examination of politics in a region which contains so many of the conflicts and
cleavages which affect political activity throughout Indonesia should provide
interesting insights and suggestive hypotheses concerning the nature of the
Indonesian political process as a whole.
Following an introductory chapter, this study is divided into two parts. In
Part One the social transformation of Simalungun/Siantar in the twentieth
century is described. From a number of relatively isolated, sparsely populated
traditional kingdoms inhabited almost exclusively by members of the
Simalungun Batak ethnic group, we trace the development in the colonial
period of the plantation economy, the inflow of migrant groups, the growth of
towns, the introduction and development of Islam and Christianity and finally
the destruction of Dutch colonialism by the Japanese occupation and the
subsequent nationalist revolution.
Proceeding to the contemporary period, Part Two offers a detailed
analysis of the nationally-based political parties and their affiliated
organizations which have provided the major channels of political
communication between the people of the region and the structures of regional
and national government. Following the party analysis, Chapter 10 describes
the development of political leadership and organization within the
Simalungun Batak community, where national political parties have failed to
take deep root, as a sort of case study within a case study of the response of
one ethnic group to the demands and challenges of post-independence
Indonesian politics. Finally, in the concluding chapter the relationship between
the local political environment in Simalungun/Siantar and the national polity
of which it is a part is discussed more explicitly, drawing together the threads
of analysis and attempting to provide at least partial answers to the questions
posed in this Introduction.