Prakash Raj’s false history : Twisting Indonesia’s reality to target RSS
By Manoranjana Gupta
Prakash Raj’s pontification on Indonesia, blind to its history and realities, insults both India and Indonesia. Bali’s Hindu survival, Indonesia’s terror scars, and the sacrifices of its people cannot be reduced to a shallow anti-RSS punchline
There is a difference between opinion and knowledge, between casual provocation and informed reflection. In recent days, actor Prakash Raj has blurred this line to dangerous absurdity.
His now-viral quip that Indonesia, with 11,000 temples and a Muslim majority, suffers no communal strife “because the RSS does not exist there,” is less a statement than a caricature of ignorance. It deserves not applause but correction.
A nation of Islands, not a monolith
Indonesia is not a singular landmass but the world’s largest archipelago – over 17,000 islands scattered like emeralds across two oceans. Within this vast geography lies Bali, the solitary Hindu-majority province. Hindus are indeed a minority in the Indonesian republic, amounting to barely 1.6–1.7 percent of its 270 million people. But on Bali, they constitute nearly 86 percent.
To speak of “2% Hindus and 11,000 temples” without mentioning Bali is like describing the Himalayas without acknowledging Everest. The temples in question are primarily Balinese pura, embedded in a culture that resisted Islamization when the Majapahit empire retreated from Java. To portray this as a national phenomenon is not just misleading – it is historically illiterate.
Temples and tourism, not trivial statistics
Prakash Raj bandies about “11,000 temples” as if they are evenly strewn across the republic. In truth, Bali alone is temple-dense, a living museum of Hindu-Buddhist syncretism. The “Mother Temple” at Besakih commands spiritual reverence; the Subak water temples are UNESCO heritage.
Meanwhile, the ninth-century Borobudur and Prambanan complexes – Buddhist and Hindu respectively – stand not on Bali but on Java.
Nor is the economic significance trivial. Bali’s temples are not inert ruins but the beating heart of a tourism economy that contributes upwards of 70 percent of the island’s GDP. To reduce them to a communal prop in a half-baked sermon is to insult both the culture and the economics they sustain.
The myth of ‘no riots’
The actor’s most astonishing error, however, lies in his breezy claim that Indonesia is free of communal violence. Anyone remotely familiar with Southeast Asian history knows otherwise.
In May 1998, during the fall of Suharto, Jakarta and other cities witnessed orgies of violence in which more than a thousand people – many of them ethnic Chinese – were killed.
Between 1999 and 2002, the Maluku islands (Ambon) descended into Christian-Muslim warfare, leaving thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced.
In Poso, Central Sulawesi, another communal conflict raged from 1998 to 2001 with similar devastation.
And then there was Bali itself: the 2002 bombings killed 202 innocents, mostly foreign tourists and local Hindus, in what remains Indonesia’s worst terror atrocity. A smaller bombing followed in 2005. If this is “no riots,” then words have lost their meaning.
The catalogue of terror
Indonesia’s security services have spent two decades fighting a hydra of Islamist militancy. Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), inspired by Al-Qaeda, masterminded the Bali bombings. Jamaah Ansharut Daulah (JAD), aligned with ISIS, carried out the 2018 Surabaya church bombings in which families with children became Islamist suicide attackers. Mujahidin Indonesia Timur (MIT) waged insurgency in Sulawesi until its leader Santoso (also known as Abu Wardah) was killed in 2016. These groups are but the better known; there are splinters aplenty.
Far from being a tranquil utopia, Indonesia has endured repeated waves of jihadist violence. Its counter-terror unit, Densus 88, was forged in cooperation with the United States and Australia, and has neutralized thousands of militants. The notion that the absence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) in Jakarta explains the relative calm of today is laughable – akin to suggesting that Delhi traffic jams exist because New York lacks the Congress Party.
Shariah in Aceh, pluralism elsewhere
Another inconvenient truth: while Bali is celebrated for its Hindu openness, Aceh in Sumatra lives under a form of Shariah law permitted under Indonesia’s special autonomy framework. Floggings for moral offences are routine. This is not, as Prakash Raj would like to imagine, the hallmark of a “riot-free” paradise but a compromise forged in the aftermath of insurgency. Indonesia, in other words, balances between its pluralist constitution and its concessions to hardline realities. To shoehorn this into an anti-RSS punchline is to trivialize a nation’s constitutional struggle.
History matters
The history Prakash Raj ignores is sobering. Indonesia’s Hindu-Buddhist past – from the Śrīvijaya maritime empire to the Majapahit court – shaped its architecture, language, and literature. Bali’s survival as a Hindu bastion is not a gift of Muslim tolerance but the result of centuries of migration, resistance, and cultural resilience. In 1906 and 1908, when Dutch colonial troops stormed Balinese palaces, entire royal families walked to ritual self-immolation – puputan – rather than surrender. That is the depth of sacrifice on which Bali’s Hinduism stands.
The folly of celebrity sermons
It is one thing for an actor to inhabit scripts written for him. It is quite another for him to improvise upon the history of nations. When Prakash Raj pontificates on Indonesia without the faintest grasp of its demography, conflicts, or archaeology, he does not merely look uninformed – he trivializes the blood and memory of those who died in Bali’s bombings, Ambon’s clashes, or Jakarta’s riots.
The responsibility of public speech is not light. A careless joke from a tea stall may pass unnoticed; a careless remark from a celebrity ricochets through millions of screens. To suggest that communal harmony in a faraway archipelago owes its existence to the absence of an Indian cultural organization is not only ignorant but intellectually unserious.
India’s lesson, Indonesia’s truth
The lesson here is not that Prakash Raj should muzzle himself, but that he should inform himself. Indonesia’s relative success in containing terror is due to state capacity, international partnerships, and a hard-won recognition of pluralism, not the absence of the RSS. Bali’s beauty rests on centuries of Hindu continuity, not the benevolence of its neighbors. And the world’s fourth-largest nation is far too complex to be reduced to a prop in a domestic political quarrel.
Stick to the script, not to history
Shashi Tharoor once wrote that “to have knowledge is to be aware of one’s own ignorance.” By that measure, Prakash Raj is a man blissfully unaware. He should return to the craft he knows – acting – rather than auditioning, disastrously, as a historian. For history demands rigor, not rhetoric; facts, not fables.
If Bali’s temples could speak, they would testify not to the absence of the RSS but to the endurance of Hinduism under siege. If the ghosts of 2002 could whisper, they would remind us that peace is precious, bought at great cost. And if Indonesia itself could answer Mr. Raj, it might suggest – politely but firmly – that ignorance, however confidently stated, is still ignorance.
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