Nail Holes in a Symbol

In central Java last week, several million illiterate voters punched a nail through a printed symbol representing one of 69 political parties. At day's end one symbol had the winning number of nail holes. The symbol: the hammer and sickle of the Indonesian Communist Party. The Communists had won an overwhelming victory in four key areas of Indonesia's most populous island.

The Communists were well equipped with money and organization, but the man the Communists had to thank for their victory was none other than President Sukarno himself. Indonesia's national hero and the father of his country, Sukarno has never in his life stood for elective office. He was much impressed by the ideals of Thomas Jefferson and Dwight Eisenhower on his U.S. visit last year, but as a grade-school kind of Marxist he found his visit to Red China a few months later much more instructive.

Guided Democrat. At home, the quarreling and corruption of Indonesian politics irritated him. The yes men who surrounded him in his nation's first days turned to no men once they were elected to the newly formed Parliament and owed their power to him no longer, but to the electorate. Sukarno disowned even the Nationalist Party which originally was his creation. Only one group stayed slavishly loyal to him, no matter what he said--the Communist Party, which also escaped the brunt of his corruption charges for the reason that it has never been in the Cabinet. When Sukarno, impatient of confused and ineffectual democracy, proposed to run a "guided democracy" (with Sukarno as guide and leader), he insisted that Communists be included in his suprastate National Council.

Sukarno's activities have long distressed Indonesia's democratic parties, and the chaos at the center has brought army revolts all over Indonesia, largely bloodless because the local commanders want to remain loyal to the central government, if only the government would prove worth its loyalty. In Djakarta last week, distressed by Communist gains and Sukarno's methods, sat Premier Djuanda Karta-widjaja, an able administrator who has been in virtually every Indonesian Cabinet since 1949. In his first interview with a foreign correspondent since taking office, Djuanda made it quietly clear last week to TIME Correspondent James Bell that he does not recognize the legality of Sukarno's Communist-infested super-council. Said Djuanda: "You must remember that the Constituent Assembly still sits in Bandung. Hence, the solutions in government structure now in evidence are temporary. The Constituent Assembly might well decide that what we need is a Senate and not a National Council."

Prudent Declaration. As for Sukarno, a kind and friendly man with pretensions to political learning, he was off on a baby-kissing tour of South Borneo, cracking jokes that had audiences slapping their hips with glee, and making pleas for national unity--the kind of unity, he said, he had found in Red China. After hearing the results of the Communist victory in Java, he thought it prudent to declare: "I am no Communist. I cannot become a Communist."

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