INTRODUCTION

Borobudur sits right in the centre of the island of Java. When it was rediscovered in 1814, this magnificent temple was buried in the jungle, and Java at that time was under the British rule. Attempts to solve the mysteries of Borobudur started soon thereafter.

In 1927 Krom listed nearly 300 publications related to Borobudur studies already in print. Toward the end of the 20th century this number has grown to over 500. Study after study has attempted to reveal the monument's origin, meaning, or function. And yet, from these studies and at least from the time Borobudur undergone the first major restoration (1907–1911), it has also become clear that we do not have any lucid historical data beyond what is left of the structure itself. This has not only hampered any attempts to understand Borobudur as a whole, but also led to more and more controversies. One can see the debate developing over time and through many eminent scholars’ contributions to Borobudur studies.

Divergences are quite healthy and fairly common in scholarship when they lead us to enhance our understanding of the subject matter. But when we examine how these divergences have arisen and developed in Borobudur studies, the result is not very encouraging. We find some alarming indications that raise even more substantial questions about the processes with which studies on Borobudur have been carried out. Perhaps it suffices to say for the moment that, facing such a vicious circle, no one needs to wonder any longer why the current state of knowledge of Borobudur is so confusing. At least, when the word ‘mystery’ in Borobudur studies presents itself, one may now realize that after almost two centuries from the rediscovery of Borobudur the word is more likely an expression of desperation than wonder. Until recently there has been no solid answer to many fundamental problems of Borobudur: no clear explanation or consensus on what Borobudur is, why the builders built it, not even about the meaning of its name. As such, despite the long history of Borobudur studies, there has been so far no indication that we are getting closer to attaining the goal of an improved understanding of the monument.

Penanggungan is the name of an extinct volcano lying in the province of East Java near the city of Surabaya. Although rising just 1,650 m above sea-level, the mountain forms an impressive landmark on the northern plains, where it serves as a natural boundary separating the regencies of Pasuruan and Mojokerto (Fig. 10.1). To the east, at a distance of some 25 km, can be found the ancient site of Majapahit at Trowulan (Mojokerto), while to the south lie the majestic peaks of the Arjuna-Welirang massif.

One only has to glance at Penanggungan's unique form, comprising four minor prominences arranged symmetrically around a steep conical summit, to understand how the mountain came to be identified with the sacred five-peaked Mahāmeru of Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Available historical sources confirm that Mt Penanggungan was formerly known as Pavitra (‘pure’, ‘holy’, ‘purifying’), a name referred to in both early Javanese and Sundanese literature, as well as in at least one 10th-century inscription from eastern Java. According to a legend immortalized in the Old Javanese Tantu Paṅgәlaran, the holy Mahāmeru was removed from its original position in the Himalaya and brought to Java through the combined effort of the gods. During the journey, however, the topmost section became detached and fell to earth, forming the mountain Pavitra, while the remaining mass was set down in the Tengger highlands at the eastern end of the island, becoming known as Mt Semeru (3,676 m), Java's highest peak.

Given the mountain's supreme sanctity, as well as its proximity to the former Majapahit capital, it is hardly surprising that Penanggungan preserves an abundance of archaeological remains. Curiously, however, it was not until about eighty years ago that this rich cultural legacy began to attract serious attention. While it is true that a number of ancient sites located at the foot of the mountain, such as Jolotundo, Belahan and Jedong, had already been documented during the 19th century, there was little knowledge of the conditions on the upper slopes. Early published field reports are limited to a brief note concerning the remnants of a structure on the mountain's summit by the vulcanologist H. Zollinger (1846: 134) and a romantic description of Candi Selokelir by F.L. Broekveldt (1904: 23–27), who visited the site in 1900 while serving as controleur at Trawas (Mojokerto).

INTRODUCTION

The central figure in this chapter is Sītā as depicted in the Rāmāyaṇa bas-reliefs on the inner side of the balustrade wall enclosing the ambulatories of the three main shrines of the temple complex of Candi Prambanan. One of the riddles that Sītā presents us with at this temple site is her background, that is to say her birth and parentage. This matter appears to be particularly relevant for the interpretation of the twelfth bas-relief scene on the Brahmā temple, which shows Rāvaṇa's corpse surrounded by a few women. The caption with the photograph taken by H. Leydie Melville around 1900 reads ‘Lamentation of Rawana by his wife Mandodari’ (see Fig. 8.1). This caption as well as the subsequent descriptions of the scene seems to me to fall short. For instance, unlike what some researchers write about the relief, it is not so much the death or the killing of Rāvaṇa that is represented here (presumably because of the alleged ill effects thereof) as his corpse lying in state on what looks like a funeral pyre.

Next is the problem of the identification of the attending women. Contrary to what is commonly assumed, it may not only concern Queen Mandodarī and Rāvaṇa's other queen-consorts. Because of the connection with the immediately preceding relief, which shows Sītā in the presence of Queen Mandodarī, it does not seem unlikely that Sītā had joined these mourning women. But if this supposition holds true, how should Sītā's presence near the body of her abductor and constant tormentor be explained? In what personal relationship, if any, are they represented in this relief?

Perusal of the literature shows that in numerous post-Vālmīki tellings, Sītā is represented as the daughter of Rāvaṇa with his main consort Mandodarī. This representation is known among widely separated peoples in countries like Tibet and Khotan (Turkmenistan), but also in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Java, Sunda). Also in India, where the Rāma-story originated, this idea is not completely unknown. Indeed, some scholars believe that the original idea was invented by the Jains. Initially it was assumed that the Uttarapurāṇa of Guṇabhadra, a Jain text dated to the 8th or 9th century CE, was the origin of all narratives in which Sītā figures as Rāvaṇa's daughter.

This edited volume is the second of two forming an anthology that programmatically reconsiders the creative contribution of the littoral and insular regions of Maritime Asia to shaping new paradigms in the Buddhist and Hindu art and architecture of the mediaeval Asian world. Both volumes, inscribing themselves in the same intellectual trajectory of the edited volume Esoteric Buddhism in Mediaeval Maritime Asia: Networks of Masters, Texts, Icons published by ISEAS (Acri 2016), bring together new interdisciplinary research that contributes to a new sense of the historical role of Maritime Asia. Overall, they aim to recalibrate the importance of these innovations in art and architecture, thereby highlighting the cultural creativity of the monsoon-influenced southern rim of the Asian landmass. They also make a case for the importance of comparatively studying those phenomena from the prism of intra-Asian connections, taking into account circulatory dynamics while remaining anchored to the disciplinary traditions specializing on the various regions that constitute the rich cultural mosaic of Maritime Asia.

Most of the proposed studies stem from papers presented in two summer programmes held in East Java in 2016 (co-organized by the SOAS Southeast Asia Art Academic Programme [SAAAP] and the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre of ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute) and in Central Java in 2017 (co-organized by the SOAS SAAAP and Universitas Gadjah Mada). These scholarly gatherings aimed at rediscovering the influence of the Buddhist and Hindu paradigms of mediaeval kingdoms adjoining the maritime trade route. With contributions from leading local and international scholars, the anthology expands on themes of innovation and transfer in the unique monuments, icons, and rituals developed in South India and Sri Lanka, Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula, Java, and the Khmer and Cam domains that strongly impacted Buddhist and Hindu art, architecture, and religious culture in India, Nepal, Tibet, and China, and incite to deeper explorations.

Having discussed the intellectual framework informing this collective body of work in the Introduction to Volume One (Acri and Sharrock 2022), containing nine studies mainly dealing with intra-Asian transfers and mainland Southeast Asia, we will now summarize the nine studies contained in this volume, mainly covering the regions of Odisha and Java.

INTRODUCTION

The perceptive Dutch anthropologist and Java scholar Roy Jordaan spent a great deal of time documenting the Śaiva temple complex at Prambanan, collating prior scholarship on the temple and contemplating its many extant mysteries. Among the fruits of his efforts was a conceptualization that consistently explained a number of curious features of the temple's core complex: the thesis that the entire inner courtyard was intermittently flooded, creating a giant tīrtha at the sacred site so as to in effect re-create the fabled Ocean of Milk, a sight which must have been so dramatic and majestic as to signal far and wide the elemental importance of Central Java across the Hindu-Buddhist world at the time. Jordaan's thesis has not received the measure of scholarly appreciation it deserves. The present chapter seeks to amend that situation by solidifying Jordaan's thesis and amplifying it into previously unexplored directions.

So far as I am aware, there has yet to be a study suggesting how the Śaiva temple complex at Prambanan actually functioned and what rituals were carried on in it. This chapter will argue that although the paramount ritual focus of the Prambanan temple was the consecration of water by its lustral flow over the towering erect statue of Śiva mounted on a yoni (as well as similar yoni- mounted statues of Brahmā and Viṣṇu in their respective temples), there was a collateral production of large quantities of sanctified water flowing over a thousand hitherto-unrecognized liṅgas that studded the balustrades and superstructures of the eight largest temples in Prambanan's central courtyard. In this sense, the Prambanan temple serves principally as a mechanism for the passive production of consecrated water. The scale of this vast and elegant holy water production monument was unrivalled in premodern Asia, and comparable only with ‘purification sculptures’, Śivaliṅgas carved into the rocky beds of natural rivers such as at Kbal Spean in Cambodia. I hope that the reader will come to share Jordaan's and my conviction that the Śaiva temple at Prambanan counts among the astounding conceptual formulations undertaken by the Javanese in their extraordinary kingdom.

After a rehearsal of the elements of Jordaan's analysis, the present chapter will show that a number of the contemporaneous Indic or Indicized kingdoms incorporated standing or moving water as an element in their own sacred architecture, either as embellishment or else as a sacralized product.

In the late first millennium, bodhisattva Amoghapāśa (literally, ‘whose noose is unfailing’), a special appearance of Avalokiteśvara, was an important cultic figure at several contemporaneous Eastern Indian Buddhist establishments in Bihar and Odisha. At the same time, as surviving visual as well as textual evidence suggests, this bodhisattva was favoured over a large part of the Buddhist world in Japan, China, Southeast Asia, and Nepal. After the first millennium, the cult of this bodhisattva continued to gain greater popularity during later centuries in areas where Buddhism flourished. It is clear that sculpture representing bodhisattva Amoghapāśa was considered to have immense cultic efficacy across the Buddhist world. Why did this particular aspect of bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara gain distinctive eminence at Buddhist sites across Asia during the mediaeval period?

The likely reason behind the widespread relevance of Amoghapāśa's cult was his general role as a protector, along with his specific role associated with death and the afterlife. Janice Leoshko (1985: 135) briefly made an insightful suggestion regarding Amoghapāśa's funerary function at Gayā (Bihar, India). Nancy Tingley (2006: 76), too, pointed to the possible mortuary associations of this bodhisattva at Ratnagiri (Jajpur district) in Odisha. Focusing on extant sculpture recovered from archaeological sites in Odisha, particularly Ratnagiri, as well as textual records, this chapter will discuss the devotional and cultic significance of Amoghapāśa as a ‘saviour at the time of death’. While attending to the perceived role of this bodhisattva in early mediaeval South Asia, I will consider the physical locations of the large-scale stone sculptures of Amoghapāśa discovered at Ratnagiri, Odisha, and explore the development of this imagery within Indic iconography and funerary ritual. I will suggest that through a fresh interpretation of the relevance and meaning of his defining attribute, the pāśa, we can understand the association of Amoghapāśa with death-related rituals in India between the 8th and early 10th centuries. Amoghapāśa was associated with extending lifespans, saving the dead at deathbed and post-mortem rites, making his worship prevalent amongst Buddhist communities across Asia.

AMOGHAPĀŚA IMAGES IN INDIA AND BEYOND

The last quarter of the first millennium was a time of active patronage and expansion of Buddhist temple as well as monastic and pilgrimage sites in Eastern India (Leoshko 1988; Proser 2010).

INTRODUCTION

The Buddhist temple of Kalasan and the the Hindu complex of Prambanan (or Lara Jonggrang) lie 3 km apart in the eastern part of the city of Yogyakarta in Central Java (see Map 7.1). Art historians have often focused on the aesthetic and religious aspects of these two temples, which, along with Borobudur, took Javanese sacred art to its apogee in the 8th and 9th centuries CE. For instance, Jordaan's studies of Kalasan proposed a link between the Buddhist goddess Śyāma-Tārā (Green Tārā) with Nyai Lara Kidul, the Javanese deity of the Southern Sea (Jordaan 1997, 1998); Jordaan and Wessing investigated possible human sacrifice rituals in Central Java on the basis of a human skeleton reportedly found in Prambanan (Jordaan and Wessing 1996: 45), concluding that human sacrifices might have emerged from a syncretic adaptation of an Indic royal cult and indigenous Javanese ancestral beliefs (ibid.: 69); Acri and Jordaan identified reliefs of 24 seated male deities that form Śiva's retinue at Prambanan temple (Acri and Jordaan 2012: 274), thereby deepening our grasp of the Śaiva cosmological notions embedded in the design of the complex. Adding to these insights, this chapter looks for traces of the social life forming the context for those Central Javanese sacred buildings, following the view that the architecture of monuments points beyond itself to the totality of its social context (Leah 2002: 125, 134).

Butzer (1980: 418) argued that archaeology, artifacts, and their social context are the basic ingredients for more accurately disclosing life in the past. This chapter studies the epigraphy of the Kalasan and Prambanan temple complexes to uncover traces of the social life of the Javanese in the 8th and 9th centuries. The massive construction effort required to erect the Kalasan and Prambanan temples was the result of the political elite, the religious leaders, and the general public forming a dynamic and interactive support network that combined and focused the various groups’ abilities and skills to achieve unprecedented heights in sacred art and architecture.

This chapter asks how the temples of Kalasan and Prambanan were initiated and executed, and how they were maintained.

The Indonesian presidential election held on 18 April 2019 was markedly different from the series of elections held in Indonesia since the democratization of 1998. One of its most prominent features was the incessant and widespread use of disinformation, both online and offline. A second notable feature was the feverish online election campaigns of both the Jokowi–Ma’ruf Amin and Prabowo–Sandiaga Uno camps. Online influencers and buzzers in both camps played significant roles in the election, each with distinct characteristics and patterns. The third feature of the 2019 election was the serious effort required on the part of both campaigns to discern the real facts and real voices of voters amid tremendous volumes of fake or dubious news and social media messages. Both sides used artificial intelligence (AI)3 to analyse big data amassed from online news and social media sites as well as offline data sets. The fourth feature was the start of political micro-targeting. The Jokowi team was far more engaged with this effort; groups of information technology (IT) specialists used data analysis through AI to micro-target voters and advised the Jokowi campaign on how best to tailor local campaign activities to local needs and characteristics.

This chapter describes these new election characteristics and campaign activities, based on interviews with actors from both camps. It argues that while political campaigners are strongly motivated to disseminate disinformation to influence voters, they also must discern the “real” voices and concerns of voters, and that they do so by using big data and AI. The Jokowi camp even started political micro-targeting using AI. In this sense, Indonesian politics has finally and seriously entered the post-truth era.

Arrival of the Post-truth Era in Indonesian Politics

Post-truth is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”. The post-truth phenomenon has become quite visible since 2016, especially in the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States and the polls for the British exit from the European Union (or Brexit). In Indonesia, it started with the Jakarta gubernatorial election of 2017, and the 2019 presidential election was the typical election of the post-truth era.

Indonesia held simultaneous elections for president and both the national and regional parliaments on 17 April 2019. According to information available on the ethnic backgrounds of successful candidates, at least eleven Indonesians of Chinese descent have been elected into the national parliament, the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat (DPR); also, several Chinese Indonesians have been elected into regional parliaments or the Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah Provinsi (DPRD). These numbers show clearly that there was Chinese political participation in Indonesia.

Political Participation and Ethnic Chinesebased Politics

Political participation is defined here as “activity by private citizens designed to influence governmental decision-making”. It includes violence (Huntington and Nelson 1976, p. 4). In my view, political participation can be divided into formal political participation and informal political participation. Formal political participation involves participating through political parties while informal political participation refers to political activity through non-governmental organizations, civil society organizations or pressure groups.

Ethnic Chinese political participation in Indonesia has occurred at both the formal and informal levels. However, Chinese political activity is designed not merely to influence governmental decision-making but also to strengthen the national identity of the Chinese minority. It is through political participation, especially through formal participatory processes, that the Chinese minority has become recognized as part of the Indonesian national polity.

The Chinese have been involved in politics since the colonial period. It is important to note here that the Chinese in Indonesia were not— and still are not—a homogeneous group. They can be divided into two categories, peranakan and totok (singkeh). The former refers to the local-born and Indonesian-speaking Chinese while the latter refers to China-born, Chinese-speaking Chinese. The latter were newcomers in relative terms. Their direct descendants were often Chinese-educated and preserved the culture of their migrant fathers, so culturally they were often considered as totok. The Chinese who were involved in local politics were usually the peranakans. Nevertheless, owing to the absence of significant numbers of Chinese new migrants into Indonesia during the Suharto period, Chinese Indonesians, especially the younger generations, have been highly Indonesianized.

Prior to World War II, Chinese political participation was on ethnic terms, i.e., the Chinese took part in politics mainly through ethnic organizations.

On 17 April 2019, Indonesians marched to the polls to elect their president and vice president directly for the fourth time since direct election of the highest offices of Indonesia was introduced in 2004. And for the first time, concurrently, Indonesians had to elect 575 members of the national parliament (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat, DPR), 136 members of the Regional Representative Council (Dewan Perwakilan Daerah, DPD), and 19,722 members of the regional legislatures (2,207 members of the provincial legislature and 17,515 members of the district/municipal legislatures) (BPS 2019, p. 26). While this combination of elections was a major historical undertaking, attention was more focused on the presidential election, not just because the presidential office holds significant executive powers, but also because the key contenders were the same as those for the last presidential election.

The incumbent, President Joko Widodo (popularly known as Jokowi), had to face off against the same rival, former army general and founder of the Great Indonesia Movement Party (Partai Gerakan Indonesia Raya or Gerindra), Prabowo Subianto. Although the vice-presidential candidates were different—Jokowi picked Muslim cleric Ma’ruf Amin while Prabowo settled on the successful self-made businessman Sandiaga Uno—the political support bases did not differ significantly from the last contest five years before. In fact, we could make the case, based on the electoral outcome, that the polarization between the two camps of supporters—loosely framed as Islamic moderates-pluralists and Islamic conservatives—had intensified. No doubt, this is in large part due to the curious fact that the key players and dynamics of Indonesia's political major league had remained largely unchanged, such that the same pair of frontrunners had emerged again. It is in this vein that we may consider the 2019 elections as the Jokowi–Prabowo elections 2.0, and it is the objective of this volume to unravel the dynamics of the elections.

The aforementioned polarization, or the emergence of an ideological divide among voters, was already apparent during the first Jokowi– Prabowo presidential race in 2014. Jokowi had more sway among moderate Muslims and ethnic and religious minorities, who preferred a more pluralist Indonesia. In contrast, Prabowo garnered more votes from conservative Muslims, who desired a more extensive role for Islam in Indonesia's social and political life.

Slogan of Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan

One of the key provinces contributing to the victory of Joko Widodo (Jokowi) in the 2019 presidential election was Central Java. By achieving a landslide in the province—77.2 per cent of the total votes—Jokowi was able to offset his loss in three major provinces outside Java. Furthermore, Jokowi improved his performance in Central Java by 10.55 percentage points, compared with his performance in the 2014 presidential election. He won all 29 districts and six cities in the province, replicating his victory in 2014. In contrast, his challenger, Prabowo Subianto, not only failed to steal votes from Jokowi's stronghold, but his vote share shrank by 10.6 percentage points, compared with 2014. Prabowo failed to capitalize on the increase in registered voters in Central Java from 27,385,217 in 2014 to 27,896,902 in 2019.

This chapter aims to examine local dynamics in the 2019 elections. The case study is Central Java Province, home to ethnic Javanese and a province with the third largest electorate in the country. Aside from the presidential election, this chapter will look at the fierce competition between political parties in the legislative elections, where 1,046 legislative positions were up for grabs in Central Java. The legislative positions were for national, regional and local parliamentary seats. Because the elections were held simultaneously, this chapter will also examine the coat-tail effects of the presidential election.

The chapter poses three principal questions. First, why did Jokowi win with such a big margin in Central Java despite aggressive attempts by Prabowo's camp to infiltrate the province? Second, why did the Prabowo camp's efforts to mobilize voters through identity politics involving religion seem to be futile in Central Java, compared with its efforts in other parts of Indonesia? Third, why did the Partai Demokrasi Indonesia Perjuangan (Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle or PDI-P, for short) still garner a significant number of votes amid the ferocious competition between political parties in Central Java?

To answer those questions, I conducted fieldwork in several major cities and districts in Central Java (Semarang, Solo, Boyolali, Tegal and Brebes) from February to April 2019.

By the end of 2020, Indonesia's post-1998 form of rule in its more perfect form had been trialled for over a year. In this chapter, I argue that the form of rule changed after 1998 from that of clique rule under a class absolutist form of state to that of collective clique rule under a slightly weakened form of class absolutism. During the years 1998 to 2019, collective clique rule was marred by divisions created by rivalries between cliques, which, in the 2013–19 period, also saw several infringements of the rules of the game that had been accepted by all the participating cliques. In late 2019, however, President Joko Widodo (Jokowi), together with his trusted cabinet minister Luhut Pandjaitan, established the broadest ever collectivity of cliques as the basis for a coalition government. Its establishment guaranteed a greater deal of stability to Indonesian political life—at least for the last twelve months—than any previous ruling configuration had. But how long will such stability last?

There can be no doubt that a major change in the form of governance has taken place in Indonesia since May 1998. The resignation of President Suharto in the face of escalating mass opposition, under the banner of Reformasi, ended an extended era of authoritarian government that had lasted thirty-two years. In order to understand the precise nature of this change, we need also to be precise about the character of the authoritarian rule that collapsed, especially in relation to which of its elements did and did not survive its collapse.

The New Order: Class Absolutism and Clique Rule

The New Order emerged through the process of Sukarno's overthrow and the physical and institutional elimination of all those forces supporting the Sukarno–Left alliance that had grown in popularity between 1957 and 1965 but had not achieved government. This meant the destruction, in particular, of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the majority left wing of the Indonesian National Party (PNI) and the various mass organizations connected to those two parties (as well as some smaller parties). Furthermore, as was specifically articulated in New Order political publications, and as is still contained in school textbooks today, this suppression included the suppression of that specific mode of politics that was based on the competitive and open mobilization of grassroots support behind different ideological perspectives.

The labour movement—particularly, the metal workers union, Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia (SPMI)—is the most active social movement in Indonesia post-Reformasi. SPMI has been involved in electoral politics since 2004. It labels such involvement as Buruh Go Politik (“Workers Go Politics”). This is a programme set up by the national federation that SPMI is a member of Federasi Serikat Pekerja Metal Indonesia (or FSPMI, for short) to support union members to run as legislative or executive candidates at any level of government. Starting from the industrial areas of Batam in Sumatra during the 2004 local legislative elections, the labour movement's involvement in politics represents one form of non-elite participation in Indonesian electoral democracy (Ford 2014). Such participation also marks a new era for the unions after a long period of isolation from electoral politics during the New Order period, when the labour movement was heavily restricted (Hadiz 1997).

The SPMI's political participation is situated in two main contexts in Indonesia: the decline of the manufacturing sector (World Bank 2016, p. 17) and increased political restrictions. Before the economic crisis of 1997, the manufacturing sector had contributed 9 per cent to the Indonesian economy but its contribution steadily declined after the crisis. For example, between 2003 and 2015, the rate of decline was 4.9 per cent (Tadjoedin et al. 2016). As of 2015, the sector absorbed 22 per cent of manpower, compared with the 47.8 per cent absorbed by the services sector. The decline has increased the vulnerability of workers in the sector (Tadjoedin et al. 2016).

The second context within which the SPMI operates today is increased government restrictions on political participation by labour unions since 2015. At the root of the restrictions is a series of labour protests in West Java in 2012 demanding an increase in the minimum wage. The protesters blocked a toll road leading to a manufacturing estate in Bekasi, causing significant economic losses.

The economic malaise and political constraints should have pushed the labour movement into political quiescence; instead, it thrived through political participation (Caraway and Ford 2014). In particular, in the 2014 legislative elections in both Bekasi District (kabupaten) and Bekasi City, SPMI members ran for election and two of them secured seats at the district level.