The room was packed, with scholars from across the region and Philippine students patiently listening and enthusiastically asking questions on the meaning of the Bandung Spirit for them and for their country at that four-day conference. No, this scene did not unfold in Jakarta or Bandung, where such conversations might seem natural or expected. It took place in Manila, inside a private university: De La Salle, which jointly organized the commemoration of the 70 years of Bandung Spirit with the University of the Philippines Diliman, from Nov. 5 to 8.
Two of Southeast Asia’s most thoughtful scholars, Professor Syed Farid Alatas and Professor Noor Aisha Abdul Rahman of the National University of Singapore, made the journey the conference, which was titled “Sejiwa, the Spirit of Bandung @70”, to share their reflections. Professor Alatas, a leading voice in postcolonial studies and a pioneer in the movement for autonomous knowledge production in the Global South, reminded the audience that the global impact of the 1955 Bandung Conference is undeniable. It reshaped the political consciousness of the postcolonial world. For him, Bandung was not merely an event, but a continuing orientation: a commitment to resisting domination, to building intellectual independence, and to imagining a world order that does not privilege the powerful at the expense of the newly free.
Just weeks earlier, a delegation of dozens of scholars, mostly from Xiamen University in Fujian, flew to Yogyakarta to join a similar conference at Universitas Gadjah Mada to commemorate Bandung’s 70th year because they know and appreciate importance of the 1955 event for China and the world. At the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival in Bali early this month, the Belgian writer and historian David Van Reybrouck spoke repeatedly, and with admiration, about Bandung as one of the turning points in global history, a moment when the formerly colonized stood up and declared to the world that they would no longer be governed by others’ terms.
It is striking that such reverence and intellectual curiosity surrounding Bandung is surging across Asia and beyond, and yet inside Indonesia, the state appears almost reluctant, even uneasy, to remember it. Bandung should be a source of national confidence. Indonesia has few moments in its modern history in which it truly led the world and offered a political vision larger than itself. Bandung was one of those rare moments. And yet instead of celebrating it, the government seems unsure of how to claim it, and in some cases, seems to prefer looking away.
The silence is not accidental. To foreground Bandung would be to foreground Soekarno. It was Soekarno’s moral imagination, his political courage, his clarity of language, and his ability to convene newly independent and still-colonized nations that made the Bandung Conference possible. To speak of Bandung is to acknowledge the greatness of Soekarno, not as myth, but as a statesman recognized across Asia, Africa, and Latin America as a symbol of dignity and resistance. And this is where domestic politics enters, quietly but decisively.
Prabowo Subianto does not rule in a vacuum; he rules in a political landscape shaped by memories, loyalties, wounds, and unfinished conflicts. His relationship with the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDIP) and its chairwoman, Megawati Soekarnoputri, has become increasingly strained, particularly after a suggestion that PDIP was behind the massive protests and riots that erupted at the end of August. To elevate Bandung now would be to elevate Soekarno, and in doing so, to elevate Megawati and the political legacy she guards. It would be to acknowledge that the philosophical foundation of Indonesia’s international identity, its claim to moral leadership, belongs not to the military lineage, nor to technocratic developmentalism, but to Soekarno’s anti-colonial, egalitarian, and deeply internationalist imagination.
It is not surprising, then, that instead of celebrating Bandung, the government has invested effort into an entirely different symbolic project: the rewriting of the country’s history to clean Prabowo’s past while giving way to recognize Soeharto as a national hero. Soeharto was not simply a different leader; he represented the systematic dismantling of Soekarno’s legacy, the repression of critical political memory, the silencing of entire generations of activists, students, unions, intellectuals, and artists.
To raise Soeharto to national-hero status is not a matter of historical evaluation. It is a rewriting of the country’s ethical foundation. It signals that obedience is more valuable than dissent, that order is preferable to freedom, and that the violence of erasure can be forgiven if it serves stability. To remember Bandung would be to directly challenge this narrative, because Bandung insists that dignity cannot be built on silence.
This political forgetting also reveals itself in Indonesia’s contemporary foreign policy. Under Prabowo, foreign policy has become increasingly personalized. Where the Bandung Spirit emphasized collective leadership, careful diplomacy, and moral positioning, Prabowo’s approach centers around his own presence, gestures, and instinctual decisions.
His tendency to always appease US President Donald Trump in every turn indicated his personal taste, which will only humiliates the nation. A video of him approaching Trump and told him which can be heard in an open microphone of him attempting to pursue an allegedly business deal, and asking to meet Trump’s sons, Eric and Don, has been become an international headlines for some time.
What was once a deliberative and institutionally grounded diplomatic tradition has shifted into a stage on which the president performs himself. Decisions appear abrupt, sometimes improvised, and often made without consultation with career diplomats. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, already weakened under Joko Widodo’s investor-centered diplomacy, now finds itself sidelined almost entirely. Diplomats whisper among themselves that they no longer shape foreign policy. They merely react to announcements already made.
The personalization of foreign policy has profound consequences. It hollows out the very capacity that once enabled Indonesia to speak for the Global South, mediate regional disputes, and safeguard its strategic autonomy. The Bandung Spirit required patience, institutional depth, and moral clarity. It required a belief that diplomacy was not mere performance, but responsibility. Today, foreign policy has become more theater than substance: handshakes, photo-ops, and sudden gestures replacing strategic consistency and ethical coherence.
Meanwhile, in Manila, students debated how the Bandung Spirit might help the Philippines articulate an independent foreign policy amid great-power rivalry. In Yogyakarta, scholars examined how Bandung could inform South–South cooperation in climate justice, economic equality, and technological sovereignty. In Ubud, artists and writers spoke of Bandung as a reminder that culture, too, can resist empire. Across these spaces, Bandung is alive, not as nostalgia, but as possibility.
The tragedy is not that the world remembers Bandung. The tragedy is that Indonesia is choosing to forget it. Forgetting is easier than confronting the truth that Bandung represents: that freedom is not only the absence of colonial rule, but the commitment to dignity, solidarity, and justice within the nation and beyond. To remember Bandung is to demand accountability from power. And to remember Bandung is to remember that Indonesia once believed in itself not as a market, not as a security apparatus, not as a stage for strongmen, but as a leader among equals in the struggle for a fair world.
Yet perhaps the memory has not been lost. It may simply have moved, into classrooms in Manila, lecture halls in Yogyakarta, festival stages in Bali, and conversations among students who see in Bandung not a relic, but a future waiting to be claimed.
Indonesia can still return to Bandung. But to do so, it must first acknowledge what it has tried to forget: that its voice in the world is strongest when it speaks not from power, but from principle. And that principle was given to us already, seventy years ago, when nations newly freed from empire gathered in Bandung to declare that freedom must be shared, or it is not freedom at all.
