The ongoing Jakarta gubernatorial election will likely go down as the most divisive in modern history due to the onslaught of racial and/or religiously charged attacks by the candidates’ supporters and hardline groups.
A shocking example of this was when, a couple of months ago, numerous mosques around the Indonesian capital began putting up banners saying they would refuse to perform funeral prayer rites for Muslim supporters of incumbent governor Basuki “Ahok” Tjahaja Purnama, a Chinese Christian who is on trial for alleged blasphemy against Islam. One mosque allegedly actually refused funeral prayer rites to a local deceased woman because she voted for Ahok in the first round of the election on February 15.
Many politicians (including Ahok’s rival Anies Baswedan) and religious figures decried the existence of those banners, while observers said that the justification for these banners were based on radical interpretations of the Quran.
While those banners have reportedly been taken down, the Elections Supervisory Committee [Panwaslu] reported that a new kind of banner was recently put up on the outer fence of a cemetery in the Kalideres district of West Jakarta that reads, “This cemetery refuses [burial of] hypocrites and supporters of blasphemers.”
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Even though the banner did not explicitly specify the refusal as applying to Ahok’s supporters, Panwaslu had no trouble interpreting the thinly-veiled political message it was meant to convey.
“We have taken down the banner,” said Panwaslu West Jakarta chapter head Puadi, as quoted by Tribun yesterday.
Puadi said that the burial refusal banner was the first of its kind in Jakarta. The committee is carrying out an investigation to find out who put it up.
Panwaslu West Jakarta has reportedly taken down 308 other kinds of “provocative” banners pertaining to the election so far, the most out of any of Jakarta’s municipal cities so far.
