I had little time to read up on the country, and even fewer opportunities to explore the city on my own terms, without having to soothe a crying child or answer endless questions about the taxonomy of dinosaurs. As a result, much of what I observed was in snatches, like the scattered pieces of a puzzle that I only put together in later, more reflective, months.

One of the first things to strike me was the variety and syncretism of the names I encountered. Scanning the newspaper on any given day revealed a smorgasbord of improbable monikers: Teddy Anwar, Wisnu Ali, Veronica Colondam, Leanardus Nyoman, Goenawan Mohammad.

The architectural equivalents of these names also reared up ever so often. The country’s main nationalist monument (the equivalent of Delhi’s India Gate) was called Monas, an obelisk that rose over a hundred meters into the sky and was located in expansive grounds in a square just off the Presidential Palace in central Jakarta. This was clearly the beating heart of symbolic power in Indonesia.

I walked around the Monas area one weekday morning (the baby having been deposited with a newly hired nanny). The monument’s southwest corner was dominated by an enormous statue of the Hindu god Krishna, leading the Pandava prince, Arjuna, into battle atop a chariot pulled by a fleet of kinetic horses. At the diagonally opposite end of Monas, the marble minaret of Jakarta’s largest mosque, the Istiqlal, and the cast iron steeples of the city’s Catholic Cathedral, jointly punctuated the skyline.

Later that afternoon I had an appointment with a real estate agent who took me to visit a number of prospective residences. She turned out to be a slim, young, Muslim woman called Dewi (as in ‘Devi’), who wore a western-style, fitting, satin gown. She had just returned from a wedding, she explained. When we passed a large, dilapidated house during our wanderings, she off-handedly mentioned that the building was haunted. A Muslim woman with a Hindu name, in European clothes, talking about ghosts, sounds like a description of schizophrenia, and yet it was nothing of the sort. Dewi, like most Indonesians, simply didn’t recognize this way of being as a contradiction.

Gradually, I began to settle into my new life. With Dewi’s help, I located a home. I found a pet store that sold cat-scratching posts. I bought a painted Javanese cabinet, and found a trilingual international school for my older son where he learnt English, Chinese and Bahasa Indonesia.

I started taking Bahasa classes myself. Indonesia’s national language, a standardized form of Malay, was resonant with the echoes of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and English. The word Bahasa itself is a derivative of the Sanskrit term for language, “bhasha.” One could feel terribly uneducated in Jakarta, given that everyone from shop attendants to itinerant street vendors peppered ordinary conversation with lofty vocabulary like “manushya” (man), “karena“ (because) and gajah (elephant).

I gathered nouns and adjectives (verbs were another story) with ease. Utara (north), masjid (mosque), roti (bread), asli (genuine), stroberi (strawberry), and dunia (world): it was a cinch for an Indian. As I was rapidly realizing, India and Indonesia did not merely share similar sounding names. Our cultures and histories were deeply intertwined. And our civilizations had proved capacious and open to similar, amalgamative influences. Hindu, Buddhist, Animist, Islamic and Christian thought and practices had mingled in complex historical patterns, with pilgrims, traders, warriors and colonizers from Arabia, Persia, China, and Europe leaving their imprints on both countries. India and Indonesia had for the most part resisted fundamentalism. They had instead domesticated outside influences and developed a multi-religious and tolerant ethos.

Jakarta was located on Java, Indonesia’s (and the world’s) most populous island. It was also the nation’s political and cultural core. Extensive trade routes between south and southeast Asia resulted in Java being heavily influenced by Indian-origin, Hindu-Buddhist culture. By the 7^th century CE, Hindu-Buddhist kingdoms ruled over most of Indonesia’s western islands.

This fact caused much chest thumping amongst a section of Indians. Every article or social media post I wrote over the years that indicated any virtue of Indonesian culture or society, immediately elicited a flood of testosterone-driven replies from assorted Indian nationalists about how everything good in Indonesia has been imported from mother India. But it was wrong to imagine that Java and Sumatra (amongst the most “Hindu” of Indonesia’s islands) were some passive outposts of Indian empire. The populations of Southeast Asia in fact maintained significant aspects of their original cultures, as they first “Hinduized”, and later converted to Islam from the 16^th century on.

The 16^th century also saw successive waves of Europeans make their presence felt on the archipelago. The Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and British all sought to dominate the spice trade, although over the course of the 18^th century, the Dutch United East India Company established itself as the dominant force in the region. The company’s possessions in the archipelago passed to the Dutch crown in 1800, where they remained until Indonesia declared its independence in 1945 (a fact the Dutch only recognized in 1949).

So much of this history was instantly recognizable to an Indian. In fact my most vivid early impression of Indonesia was simply one of familiarity. This was a stark contrast to my first reactions to China. The intellectual traditions of Confucianism and Taoism, a long history of territorially focused empire, and the modern rupture with the past that communism had wrought, combined to make China a creature of a markedly different temperament to India’s.

Wandering the streets of Beijing had felt like exploring an alternative dimension. The language was wholly alien in sight and sound. The scale of the imperial palaces and their communist equivalents felt outlandish. The highways seemed impossibly smooth. The winter cold was frighteningly desolate. The sugarless, milk-free “tea” that everyone drank was not a beverage of any familiarity. And despite the fact that the days when everyone dressed in identical Mao suits were long over, there was an underlying uniformity to the physical and intellectual lives of Chinese cities that was disconcerting to an Indian.

Every big city had identically glittering glass and chrome malls. Smaller towns used bathroom tiles and blue plexiglass windows as their “posh” construction material of choice. Everyone had watched the same films. And everyone seemed to ask the same questions about India: “Why don’t you have a one child policy? You have too many people.” Or “Do you know La Zi [the Chinese name for Raj Kapoor]?”.

The heated political debates that were par for the course on Indian trains were absent. The pageantry of street demonstrations and strikes was missing. Calls to prayer and the ringing of temple bells were rarely part of the aural backdrop. And absolute poverty of the kind where children with distended bellies and flies in their eyes play on open gutters was hearteningly uncommon.

As I concluded in Smoke and Mirrors, China and India were like mirror images, their strengths and weaknesses in symmetrical opposition. Excited journalists and eager businessmen loved to spout Chindia-scented rhetoric replete with catchphrases that stated the obvious, but whose import was less so. China had the hardware, India the software; India needed China’s roads, China could do with India’s political inclusiveness. But given how fundamentally different India and China were, these kinds of “lessons learnt” were meaningless. An apple could not become an orange simply because a McKinsey report concluded it would be beneficial for it to do so.

Indonesia, on the other hand, was neck-to-neck with India on virtually every social indicator and governance parameter from infrastructure to sanitation. But despite, or perhaps because of, their similarities, New Delhi and Jakarta rarely bothered to cast an assessing eye across the Andaman Sea to take the measure of each other.

In Jakarta, the timbre of the quotidian was distinctly Indian. Regular demonstrations by everyone from workers clamouring for higher minimum wage to religious hardliners demanding the cancellation of Lady Gaga concerts caused massive gridlock on the roads; little retail shops selling every imaginable good from talcum powder to chocolate, sheltered in the shade of extravagant malls; the trans-Jakarta busway was like New Delhi’s Bus Rapid Transport system (but nicer); the colonial-style mansions and tree-lined boulevards in the central neighbourhood of Menteng had parallels to Lutyen’s Delhi; the call of muezzins punctuated the day; the warmth of petrichor hung over gardens, and women in burkhas shopped in stores assisted by mini-skirted sales staff. Away from the highways, not only did brightly painted three-wheeler scooters, reminiscent of India’s, ply the streets – they were in fact made-in-India by Bajaj (the term “Bajaj” is a synonym for the three-wheeler in Jakarta).

And everywhere – embedded in the language, on street signs, political commentary and bus advertisements – were references to the Hindu epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. My local mechanic was called Rama Repairs, and my neighbourhood shopping mall, Dharmawangsa Square. I discovered a nation-wide charitable foundation for twins called the Nakula and Sadewa society, and a support group for Indonesian women in mixed marriages named Srikandi (Shikhandi).

Buses were painted with large advertisements for an energy drink called Kuku Bima, which promised the imbiber Bhima-like endurance. One of the most congested arteries in the city center, Gatot Subroto, was named after a much-feted army general. An appropriate name it turned out as the name, Gatot, was a diminutive for Ghatotkacha, Bhima’s fearsome, half-demon, warrior son.

Wayang, a form of shadow puppet theatre wherein ancient stories from the Hindu epics are brought to silhouetted life on a screen, using backlit figures cut from raw buffalo hide, was a hugely popular form of entertainment in Java. Performances in rural areas could draw crowds of tens of thousands of people.

Fascinated, I began to read up on the art form. It transpired that the so-called Wali Songo – the nine 15^th century Islamic scholars credited with spreading Islam in Java – had used wayang as a tool of proselytizing. The Islamic sultans of Java, the nation’s nationalist founders like Sukarno, and even military dictator Suharto, had used stories from the Hindu epics as a legitimizing political tool.

For Indonesians, the wayang repertoire is an indigenous part of their culture, and they have a real sense of ownership over the epics. In the mid-19^th century, Ronggowarsito, a poet from the royal palace in Solo in central Java, wrote a history that traced the lineage of Javanese kings to the Pandavas, with the result that people came to believe that the epics were situated in Java, rather than India.

One evening, a year into living in Indonesia, I was returning home from a wayang performance in a south Jakarta suburb, when Pak Suharto, our driver and an observant Muslim, launched into a pedagogic explanation of an episode from the Ramayana that had been part of the show. He had joined me in the audience for the wayang and was agog with excitement. “I am too much liking Rahwana (Ravana) madam,” he’d grinned, taking his hands of the wheels, alarmingly, and holding up ten fingers. “Do you know that he is dasamukha? It means, he has ten heads.”

India’s long-lost sibling

Given its size and strategic significance, Indonesia is possibly the most under-appreciated country in the world. With 250 million citizens, it is the world’s fourth most populous nation and third largest democracy. Spread over 17,000 islands, if superimposed end-to-end on the map of Europe, the archipelago would span the distance from Ireland to the Caspian Sea. It is home to 719 languages, spoken by people from over 360 ethnic groups. Its fauna includes animals from both sides of the Wallace line (the elephants, orangutans and tigers of southeast Asia, and the marsupials of Australia).

Around 88 percent of Indonesians self-identify as Muslims, making the country home to the largest Islamic population in the world. The state, however, recognizes five other official religions, each with substantial numbers of adherents: Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Confucianism.

Indonesians from Aceh on the northwestern tip of Sumatra (separated by nothing but sea from India’s Andaman islands), and from Papua, some 5,200km to the west, have about as much in common as a Manipuri has with a Tamil. Acehnese are Arab-influenced Muslim Malays who refer to their region as the “veranda of Mecca”. Papuans are black-skinned Christians and Animists, many of whom wear nothing but penis sheaths. Such diversity is reflected in everything Indonesian, from cuisine, to music, to nomenclature.

“Bhinekka Tinggal Ika” (multiple but one) the Sanskrit-tinged phrase that is the Indonesian national motto, is in essence identical to the Indian catch phrase of “unity in diversity,” and underscores the accomplishment of the two states in having woven together a unified tapestry out of immense plurality.

Politically too, India and Indonesia are like doppelgangers. Noisy rallies, demanding trade unionists, and a free and assertive press are part of the public landscape in both nations; a far cry indeed, from the annual meetings of China’s National People’s Congress that are usually orchestrated into rigor mortis.

As a journalist, it was as difficult for me to get my head around the bewildering complexities of Indonesian politics, as it must be for first time foreign correspondents in India. Over 30 parties had contested the polls in Indonesia’s last general election in 2009. Eventually, a shambolic, six-party coalition headed by President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had come to power, but it was not having much luck in doing anything of significance.

Compared to India, Indonesia’s was a relatively new democracy. General Suharto’s three-decade-long dictatorship had only been dismantled in 1998. Yet, Jakarta felt like it had been separated at birth from New Delhi.

I moved to the city at a time when both Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Yudhoyono were in the final lap of their second terms in power. Initially heralded as potentially transformational statesmen, the leaders were nearing the end of their tenure as lame ducks, their credibility wounded by corruption scandals and their capacity to act hamstrung by their coalition partners.

Singh and Yudhoyono had seen their countries crest a wave of economic growth and foreign investment over the first decade of the millennium. Youthful demographics and an expanding middle class consumer base had caused cheering investment bankers to mark them as the economies to watch. But by 2013, these erstwhile darlings of foreign investors had been transformed into the whipping boys of Asian markets. Their once cantering economies slowed, leaving their governments with unappetizing current account deficits and plunging currencies to digest as their last supper.

General elections in both countries were scheduled for mid-2014. And the main electoral issues were largely the same: deep-seated corruption, infrastructural lacunae, yawning inequalities, unpopular economic reform, and religious intolerance.

Religious fundamentalism and communal atrocities in India were sadly familiar phenomena to me. However, I did not associate Indonesia with these. After all the country was regularly feted by world leaders as a beacon of moderate Islam. In 2013, the US-based Appeal of Conscience Foundation even awarded President Yudhoyono, a high-profile prize for promoting religious tolerance.

Meeting grim-faced human rights campaigner and journalist Andreas Harsono at a central Jakarta coffee shop one morning, therefore, came as a shock. “What we are seeing,” he said bluntly, “is a creeping Pakistanization of Indonesia.” Like Indonesia, Pakistan too, had been a relatively tolerant country until the 1970s, Harsono elaborated on this seemingly absurd comparison. But the situation there had changed dramatically in the 1980s, one clear manifestation of this shift being Islamabad’s 1984 anti-Ahmadiyya ordinance.

In Indonesia, the journalist continued, Suharto’s authoritarian regime (1967-1998) had largely suppressed religion’s role in politics for the first two decades of his rule. In the 1990s however, the general began to flirt with Islamists as a way of shoring up his power and diversifying his support bases away from the military.

Following the transition to democracy, Islamist political parties began to play an open, legal role in politics. Vigilante civil society groups operating outside the formal political system also sprang up. The latter include the notorious Front Pembela Islam (FPI), an organization that was set up in 1998 with support from government security agencies and whose goons use Islamic edicts to justify violent actions against bars and nightclubs, as well as Christian churches and the mosques of so-called apostates like Ahmadiyyas and Shias.

Harsono claimed that President Yudhoyono had not only failed to protect minorities, but also helped to lay down the legal infrastructure that discriminated against them, allowing Islamists to take the law into their own hands while the police looked the other way. He cited a 2006 decree that made it harder to obtain permits to build houses of worship for minorities, and an increasingly cavalier use of a 1965 blasphemy law, as examples.

Yudhoyono’s religious affairs minister, a hardcore Islamist, was the particular target of Harsono’s ire. I made note, but couldn’t help conjuring up a mental exclamation mark at the irony of this so-called “Wahabi” being named Suryadharma Ali.

Later that week I visited Bekasi, a suburb to the east of Jakarta, where a group of 18 Ahmadis had been holed up inside a fenced-off mosque for over two months. They had barricaded themselves inside after the local police had sealed it by placing locks on the entrances and erecting a fence of corrugated metal sheets. They were refusing to come out until the mosque was allowed to reopen and serve as a place of prayer for the area’s 400-odd Ahmadis.

A large local government hoarding placed outside the mosque referred to a number of anti-Ahmadiyya decrees and resolutions passed by religious and central governmental authorities. In 2005, the Majelis Ulema Indonesia (MUI), a coalition of Muslim organizations, issued a fatwa condemning the Ahmadiyya community as religiously “deviant”. Later, in 2008 a decree issued jointly by the Religious Affairs Ministry, Home Ministry and Attorney General ordered the Ahmadiyya community to stop all activities that “propagated” their beliefs.

Although none of these explicitly called for the sealing of Ahmadiyya mosques, the vagueness of the decree’s wording emboldened some regional governments, like Bekasi’s, to interpret the law as an outright ban on the practice of the Ahmadiyya faith.

The Ahmadis were not the only group to have fallen prey to intolerance. I met one evening with a diverse delegation of victims of religious discrimination. They had gathered in Jakarta from across the country to plead with the central government to uphold its own laws. Their complaints ranged from administrative inconveniences to intimidation, violence and even murder at the hands of radical Sunni Muslims.

Muhammad Zaini, a 22-year-old Shia from Madura in East Java spoke of 600-odd Shias being forced out of their homes from two villages in the area when a 200-strong mob of Sunni Muslims attacked their homes in August 2012. Several houses were burnt down and Zaini’s paternal uncle was killed. The Shias had subsequently moved to a refugee camp in a sports stadium. Local Sunni authorities had issued edicts against allowing them to return.

Reverend Palti Panjaitan of the HKBP-Filadelfia protestant church talked about the seven churches in the Bekasi area that had been forcibly closed or demolished by local authorities since 2005. Christian congregations across the country had been having a difficult time in recent years when it came to securing permits for the construction of churches.

Every time the reverend Palti’s congregation had tried to hold Sunday mass in Bekasi it had been disrupted by mobs of local Muslims insisting they disperse. “What can we do,” said the reverend throwing open his hands in despair. “Instead we come to Jakarta and hold our mass outside the Presidential palace, hoping that SBY [as President Yudhoyono is popularly known] finally pays us some attention.” While I was sympathetic to the church’s plight, my China-habituated self also couldn’t help but marvel at the freedom with which these disgruntled groups could protest and picket in Jakarta’s political center.

The similarities with India, where democracy has not ended illiberal or discriminatory behaviour, but has afforded those affected the right to march, were once again apparent. Cold comfort perhaps, but better than the absence of that comfort altogether.

Indonesia certainly couldn’t afford to be complacent about its achievements in having sustained a multi-cultural society. Sporadic religious riots and intolerant acts were a scourge. And predictably for a deeply devout country, democracy had played a complicating role in Indonesia’s attempts to ensure that minorities were protected from the excesses of the majority.

This was perhaps the central challenge that Indonesia and India shared: ensuring that democracy did not turn into the tyranny of the majority in a pluralistic society. India and Indonesia were fragile, yet inspiring, achievements. They were both polities that had eschewed theocracy as the basis for their nation building, yet allowed religion an active space in public life, unlike the “secular” European model. They were, as a result, trying to develop a third way, for countries where religion remained an important part of the identity of most citizens (unlike in largely agnostic Europe), but where the more exclusionary and intolerant aspects of religion were held in check.

India is a Hindu-majority country, the preamble to whose constitution asserts it is a “secular” state. However, neither India's constitution nor its laws define the relationship between religion and state. Instead, secularism is largely seen as the respect of all religions.

Indonesia is a Muslim-majority country whose constitution eschews the word “secular” all together. The founding doctrine of Pancasila that the constitution is based on professes a “belief in the divinity of the one God.” But, by leaving out a reference to any specific god (in the face of opposition from Islamists who had wanted a concrete mention of Allah), the Indonesian constitution also protects the right of citizens to freedom of religious belief and practice.

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