Art 4. Vol 2. 2026
When Narendra Modi arrived in Jakarta on July 6, 2026, the Ministry of External Affairs described the trip as advancing a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership first elevated in 2018, and Modi himself noted before departing that India and Indonesia share strong civilisational and people-to-people ties. Most of the coverage since has stayed exactly where such coverage usually stays: Astra missiles, BrahMos batteries, EVM technology transfer, and the joint development of Sabang Port near the Strait of Malacca. Bilateral trade near $30 billion, an Indo-Pacific “arc of trust” running from India through Indonesia to Australia and New Zealand. All of it real, all of it current-affairs. Almost none of it explains why Modi chose to travel on to Yogyakarta and stand at Prambanan, a temple complex India has committed to helping restore alongside Indonesia’s own heritage institute and the Archaeological Survey of India.
That stop is not a courtesy add-on to a defence itinerary. It is the more an interesting story, and almost nobody is telling it.
The temple as an argument
Prambanan is a ninth-century Hindu temple complex built by the Sanjaya dynasty of Central Java, dedicated to Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu, its reliefs narrating the Ramayana in stone panels that predate most of what survives in India itself in comparable condition. It sits a short distance from Borobudur, the largest Buddhist monument on earth, built by the rival Sailendra dynasty within decades of Prambanan and drawing on the same Gupta-era artistic and religious vocabulary that had travelled across the Bay of Bengal centuries earlier. Java did not import a diluted version of Indic civilisation. It built some of the finest expressions of it.
The traces run deeper than architecture. Bahasa Indonesia carries thousands of Sanskrit loanwords, including the words for language itself, for time, for happiness, for the state. Indonesia’s national airline and its Garuda Pancasila state emblem take their name and form from Vishnu’s mount. Wayang kulit shadow puppetry still performs the Ramayana and Mahabharata to Javanese audiences, reworked over a millennium into distinctly local tellings but never severed from their source. Bali remains, to this day, the only Hindu-majority society outside the subcontinent, its temple architecture and ritual calendar direct descendants of the same tradition Prambanan monumentalised in stone. None of this happened through conquest. It happened through trade, marriage, and the slow, voluntary absorption of ideas across the Indian Ocean, which is precisely why it has proven durable enough to outlast a Dutch colonial interlude, decades of Guided Democracy, and now nearly eight decades of a republic that officially recognises six religions and privileges none of them as foreign.
An alliance forged before Bandung
The twentieth-century relationship began not with trade ministers but with solidarity against a common colonial adversary, and India moved early. When Indonesia declared independence in August 1945, the Dutch attempt to reclaim the archipelago found New Delhi an active diplomatic opponent rather than a bystander. India convened the Asian Relations Conference in March 1947, months before its own independence, with Indonesian delegates attending despite the Dutch still contesting their right to be there at all. When the Dutch launched their second “police action” against the nascent republic in December 1948, Nehru’s government went further, hosting a Conference on Indonesia in New Delhi in January 1949 that pushed the matter onto the United Nations Security Council’s agenda and helped internationalise the pressure that eventually forced The Hague to negotiate. Sukarno did not forget the gesture. When India held its first Republic Day parade on January 26, 1950, the chief guest at Rajpath was Sukarno himself, a choice of considerable symbolic weight for a republic announcing itself to the world for the first time.
The equation of Nehru and Sukarno
What followed was one of the more consequential personal relationships in twentieth-century Asian diplomacy, and one considerably more complicated than the fraternal photographs suggest. Nehru and Sukarno were both prison-tested nationalists who had emerged from colonial rule as the dominant intellectual voice of their respective independence movements, both fluent in the vocabulary of anti-imperialism, both convinced that the newly decolonising world needed an organising idea that was neither Washington’s nor Moscow’s. That shared instinct produced the Bandung Conference of April 1955, hosted on Indonesian soil, with Nehru as its principal co-architect alongside Sukarno, Nasser, Tito, and U Nu. Bandung’s closing Dasasila, its ten principles of peaceful coexistence, were substantially an elaboration of the Panchsheel that Nehru had signed with China barely a year earlier, extended now from a bilateral pact into a manifesto for twenty-nine Asian and African states. Six years later, the logic Bandung had sketched found institutional form at Belgrade, where Nehru, Sukarno, Nasser, Tito, and Nkrumah founded the Non-Aligned Movement as a standing rejection of the premise that the postcolonial world had to choose a Cold War patron.
But the equation was never a perfect symmetry, and a serious account of it has to hold that honestly. Nehru’s non-alignment was rooted in Fabian gradualism and a genuine commitment to parliamentary process; Sukarno’s was shading, by the early 1960s, into what he called Guided Democracy, an increasingly personalist system leaning on the army and the Indonesian Communist Party in an uneasy balance Nehru’s own politics never resembled. The friendship also had limits precisely where India’s own interests were at stake. During Indonesia’s confrontation with the Netherlands over West New Guinea in 1961 and 1962, New Delhi’s support was noticeably more cautious than Jakarta wanted, unwilling to fully endorse the use of force Sukarno was contemplating. And when China invaded India in October 1962, Indonesia’s response was conspicuously neutral rather than solidly in India’s corner, a silence that stung in New Delhi and reflected Jakarta’s own deepening flirtation with Beijing in the years just before Nehru’s death in 1964. The Nehru-Sukarno equation, in other words, was a genuine meeting of civilisational memory and anti-colonial purpose, not an identity of strategic interest. That distinction matters more today than the hagiographic version of the story usually allows.
What actually survived of the Bandung spirit
The Non-Aligned Movement itself did not age well. Stripped of the bipolar Cold War order it was built to navigate, NAM drifted through the 1990s into a summit-attending relic, its moral authority undercut by members who had, in practice, aligned quite firmly with one bloc or another all along. India’s own foreign policy establishment has spent the past two decades quietly retiring the vocabulary of non-alignment in favour of “multi-alignment” and “strategic autonomy,” terms meant to signal the same underlying instinct without the Cold War baggage the older word carries.
That underlying instinct is the part worth noticing, because it is still doing work. The Indo-Pacific “arc of trust” that current Indian strategic thinking describes running from India through Indonesia to Australia and New Zealand rests on the same premise Bandung rested on: that the states within a shared geography should write the rules of that geography rather than inherit them from external powers. Bandung’s twenty-nine nations were asserting Asian and African agency against a world carved up by Washington and Moscow. The Indo-Pacific framework Modi and Prabowo are now building asserts a comparable agency against a world increasingly described only in terms of Washington and Beijing. The cast of characters has changed. The structural impulse, a middle path insisted upon rather than granted, has not.
Standing at Prambanan is therefore not sentimentality attached to a hard-security itinerary. It is closer to a thesis statement. The temple was built by a Java that absorbed Indian civilisation on its own terms and made something new and lasting from it. The republic that temple now sits inside chose India’s Republic Day, of all possible venues, to send Sukarno as its first honoured guest. And the strategic partnership being negotiated in Jakarta this week is, whether its architects say so explicitly or not, the latest attempt by both countries to do again what Nehru and Sukarno did in 1955: refuse a script written elsewhere, and write their own instead.
July 7, 2026
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