Michael Degani Review of Mohsin’s, Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development

BOOK REVIEW

Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development
by Anto Mohsin

University of Wisconsin Press
2023. xvii + 245 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-0-299-34540-2

Reviewed by Michael Degani (University of Cambridge)

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Indonesia’s electricity network comprised an integrated transmission system that spanned the major islands of Java, Bali, and Madura. Another 3,600 diesel power plants (DPPs) were scattered across the rest of its archipelago. Anto Mohsin’s excellent Electrifying Indonesia: Technology and Social Justice in National Development ranges over a century to show how these “two grid systems” came to be, and their links to the postcolonial nation-state’s political dispensation (p. 87). His key argument is that Indonesia’s logic of electrification can be described as a “patrimonial technopolitics” (p. 45). Tracking the interplay of historical conjunctures on one hand, and the affordances of fuel and technology on the other, Mohsin brings Thomas Hughes’s ”sociotechnical system” analysis to the postcolony, and STS is richer for it (Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930, 1993).

The story that unfolds first is that of an ambitious postcolonial state. In chapter 1, Mohsin discusses independence leader Sukarno’s formative impressions that Dutch colonial power was embodied in its electrification of settler neighborhoods and structures. The new country’s leadership was determined to “catch up,” nationalizing the power sector and expanding supply, all with the aim, as Sukarno put it, of “transforming from a water-minded nation to an electricity-minded nation” (p. 40, quoting “Speech by President Sukarno on the 115th Anniversary of Electricity Day,” Kebajoran Baru, October 27, 1960). More generally, the various ritual dimensions of electrification Mohsin details—ribbon-cutting ceremonies, the electric thrill of hosting the Fourth Asian Games—speaks to the ways infrastructure symbolized sovereignty across the postcolonial world, from Nigeria to Vietnam to India.

Ultimately, though, the book is centered on the specificities of Soeharto’s New Order regime (1966-98), which was responsible for most of the country’s expanded power supply. Soeharto deposed Sukarno against the backdrop of a vicious anticommunist purge and contended with the specter of rebellion in Aceh, Papua, and elsewhere. Recognizing the threat of a restive peasant population, he repurposed Sukarno’s “Pancasila” principles of social justice into a kind of “ideology of containment,” as Michael Morfit put it.[1] The paternal state would provide goods and services for its citizens and, in a more or less quid pro quo exchange, said citizens would offer up a docile political support. In effect, bringing electricity to the masses was part of a broader strategy to blunt more revolutionary leftward movements. There is an interesting echo with the mid-century corporatist compromise of Western liberal democracies, where working classes were channeled to the center through increased standards of living (embodied, notably, in electric commodities). And yet there is also a good dose of what Partha Chatterjee calls “political society,” where rural and urban poor are governed through piecemeal transactions; Mohsin scrutinizes voting patterns to find a convincing correlation between electric supply and the electoral support for the ruling party Golkar.[2] Political scientists have shown similar increases in electrification rates in the run-up to elections in India and elsewhere.[3]

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is its description of the resulting “two grid systems.” Insofar as the archipelagic nation-state inherited an extractive colonial infrastructure that privileged Dutch settlers, its patterns of electrification already evinced a pronounced urban and Java bias. And yet this rhymed with Soeharto’s own cosmopolitical orientation, steeped as he was in a political imaginary of centralized rule modeled on the fourteenth-century Majaphit empire. Referencing Benedict Anderson’s famous analysis of Javanese conceptions of power, Mohsin underscores Soekarno’s sense of himself, and by extension the island, as the axial center of a “galactic polity”—yet another case in which colonial extractivism and postcolonial ideologies eerily align.[4] These dynamics, combined with the fact that Java was the most populated island, led it to receive the lion’s share of infrastructural investment, including a networked transmission system that would eventually interconnect the regional grids of neighboring Bali and Madura.

And what of the outer islands? Here Mohsin’s analysis really shines, showing how what were in effect scattered mini-grids anchored by DPPs became the key infrastructure of the New Order’s rural electrification ambitions, beating out solar, hydro, and even nuclear power. DPPs were a relatively small, standardized, and forgivingly inexpert technology. They had variable load capacity, operated independently of weather, and could be installed in the center of town where it would be easy to find qualified personnel for maintenance. Their appeal was also buttressed by the access to cheap oil that Indonesia enjoyed as a burgeoning petrostate. In one vivid passage, Mohsin recounts how a small, chartered plane would fly to a remote village in Papua and dump barrels of diesel into a lake for locals to fish out. The echoes with Melanesian cargo-cults are unmistakable, but undiscussed.

The entity mandated to carry out this bimodal patrimonial technopolitics was PLN (Perusahaan Umum Listrik Negara), the forever hemmed-in state power company. PLN had a strong technocratic tradition rooted in the Japanese occupation of 1942 to 1945, under which many of its earliest managers were tutored. Yet over the years, under government directives and support, PLN swelled into a multi-limbed institution that not only carried out electrical service, but disbursed loans to small businesses, cultivated the careers of “local sons” in different regions, and just generally promoted Pancasila through various cultural initiatives. Although the PLN leadership’s technical expertise bought them a measure of deference, their decision-making processes were ultimately “dictated-by or least required government involvement,” up to and including the commitment to unprofitable and difficult rural electrification campaigns—a fact that customers angered by disservice were not always aware of (p. 86). This is not to say that technocrats could not themselves play political games. Mohsin notes the (probably) widespread phenomenon of skimming rents on tenders allocated for new grid construction. One of the book’s fine achievements is thus to show that the fashionable term “technopolitics” often belies a tense marriage of convenience. All technology might be “political” in some broad sense, but these two ways of thinking about a complex project like electrification cannot necessarily be seamlessly integrated.

Mohsin’s approach is very much supply-side, and he unearths the history of PLN in impressive archival detail. The experience of power consumers, on the other hand, is somewhat muted. It receives its most sustained attention in chapter 5, which discusses various research projects scrutinizing the energy habits of rural populations. Policymakers were anxious to mitigate deforestation wrought by villagers’ wood fuel harvesting, their reliance on expensively subsidized kerosene, and, after the oil crisis of 1973, the expense of not-so-cheap oil for DPPs. Like patronizing modernists everywhere, they concluded that the peasants should learn to be more efficient in their energy use, and despaired that electricity was being wasted on consumer goods like television rather than driving industry. Mohsin argues that the latter was in fact largely the government’s own doing. The government’s obsessional drive for rural electrification in the 1970s and 1980s—often measured by a single connection point in any village—came at the expense of developing complementary systems like roads or markets. I will return to this important point below.

Mohsin devotes the final chapter to the fate of an “also-ran” sociotechnical system: three rural electric cooperative schemes funded by the US Agency for International Development and other donors. Their trajectories varied, and often hinged on the organizational competence of local bureaucrats and board members. Yet in all cases they were hindered by the fact that PLN treated rural electric cooperatives as “step-child[ren],” seeing them as competition and forcing them to buy electricity at industrial rates (p. 152). Rapidly growing demand paired with the fiscal crunch of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis provoked riots, failure, and eventual PLN nationalization. When Mohsin concludes that peasants did not necessarily want to be involved in the democratic decision-making of a cooperative, but rather “just wanted electricity,” it is not hard to see how the foundation for such an attitude was laid by the policies of the New Order itself (p. 153).

The conclusion draws out the legacies of the New Order’s patrimonial technopolitics as they unfolded into the twenty-first century. PLN has weathered an only partial liberalization that involved corrupt tendering practices and continues to rely on government subsidies to prop up non-cost-reflective tariffs, all against an expanding consumer base—a familiar postcolonial story.[4] But one question I am left with is why electricity became the privileged expression of Indonesian nation building in the developmentalist era. After all, not every postcolonial state invested so much in that specific technology. It is here that a comparison with the relative lack of roads and markets might provide at least one part of the answer. Roadways are surely expensive in the “highly contoured landscape” of mountains and islands, making air and sea the preferred modalities for organizing national space-time (p. 100). Against this backdrop, a “galactic polity” of diesel generators orbiting a central network is a logical medium of nationalist consolidation. A continuous power supply is a way of integrating far-flung villagers to the state without being physically contiguous to it. This is in part because of the way electricity channels television, radio, light, and other forms of connection at a distance.

These are the kinds of broader questions that, though Electrifying Indonesia does not ask directly, it nevertheless provokes. A bit like the two-grid system, it provides a consolidated account of national experience that in turn anchors a larger thematic galaxy of comparison. It thus significantly enriches the field of postcolonial STS. It will reward the specialist of Southeast Asian studies, and indeed any reader interested in the multidimensional interplay of electrification and sociopolitical formations.

Notes

[1]. Mohsin, p. 83, quoting Michael Morfit, “Pancasila: The Indonesian State Ideology according to the New Order Government,” Asian Survey 21, no. 8 (1981): 838–51, https://doi.org/10.2307/2643886. Quote is on p. 846.

[2]. Partha Chatterjee, “Beyond the Nation? Or Within?” Social Text 56 (1998): 57-69.

[3]. Drini Imami, Endrit Lami, Edvin Zhllima, Muje Gjonbalaj, and Geoffrey Pugh, “Closer to Election, More Light: Electricity Supply and Elections in a Postconflict Transition Economy,” Post-Communist Economies 32, no. 3 (2020): 376-90.

[4]. Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Culture and Politics in Indonesia, ed. Claire Holt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 1-69; Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3 (2013): 503-34, https://doi.org/10.14318/hau3.3.033.

[5]. See, for example, Michael Degani, The City Electric: Infrastructure and Ingenuity in Postsocialist Tanzania (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022).

[This review from H-Net is reproduced here under a Creative Commons License]