In March 1945, the Japanese military authority in Java during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia established the Investigating Committee for Preparatory Work for Independence to decide on key issues related to the future independent state, including its constitution. There was a clear division on the committee between those who wanted a secular state and those who wanted a greater role for Islam. On 1 June, the last day of the first session, nationalist and future Indonesian president Sukarno made a speech outlining the Pancasila - the five principles that would form the ideological basis of the new state. A sub-committee of eight members, the panitia kecil, was set up with Sukarno as chairman to discuss the issues that had emerged.
The drawing up of the document
In the recess between the two BPUPK sessions, at the urging of future president Sukarno, 38 members met and decided to task a committee of nine members, the Panitia Sembilan, with starting to draft the constitution. These members, and their affiliations were:
Over the course of the afternoon of 22 June, the nine men produced a preamble for the constitution that included Sukarno's Pancasila philosophy, but added the seven words in Indonesian that placed an obligation on Muslims to abide by Islamic law. Mohammad Yamin, who played a dominant role in the wording, named the preamble the Jakarta Charter.
Text of the document
Subsequent developments
On 17 August 1945, Sukarno declared Indonesian independence. The following day, the Preparatory Committee for Indonesian Independence, which had been established with Japanese permission on 7 August, was due to meet. Hatta in particular and Sukarno were both worried that the obligation on Muslims would alienate non-Muslims. Before the meeting, Hatta met with Muslim leaders and managed to persuade them to agree to the removal of the seven words "for the sake of national unity". The PPKI then met and elected Sukarno and Hatta president and vice-president respectively. It then discussed the draft constitution, including the preamble. Hatta spoke in favour of removing the seven words, and Balinese delegate, I Gusti Ktut Puja, suggested replacing the Arabic word "Allah" with the Indonesian word for God. This was accepted, but for some reason when the constitution was officially published, this change was not made. Following further discussion, the constitution was approved. When the 1945 constitution was replaced by the United States of IndonesiaFederal Constitution of 1949, and this in turn replaced by the Provisional Constitution of 1950, there were no attempts to include the seven words in the preambles, despite their similarity to 1945 version. However, in 1959, the Constitutional Assembly of Indonesia, which had been set up to produce a permanent constitution, reached deadlock as the Islamist fraction wanted a greater role for Islam, but like the other factions, did not have enough support to win the two-thirds majority to push through its proposals. The Islamist faction supported the government's proposal to return to the 1945 Constitution on condition that the obligation on Muslims be re-inserted in the preamble. The nationalist faction voted this down, and in response, the Islamist faction vetoed the reintroduction of the 1945 Constitution. On 9 July 1959, Sukarno issued a decree dissolving the assembly and reinstating the original constitution, but without the seven words the Islamists wanted. To placate them, Sukarno stated that his decree relied on the Jakarta Charter, which had inspired the 1945 Constitution and which was an "inseparable" part of it, but was not a legal part of it. There were two further attempts to revive the Jakarta Charter. In the 1968 special session of the Provisional People's Consultative Assembly, Parmusi, a new Islamist party, called for it to have legal force, but the proposal was voted down. In 2002, during the MPR session that passed the final amendments to the constitutions, a number of small Islamic parties with the support of Vice-president Hamzah Haz tried again, this time by amending the Article 29 of the constitution to make shariah law obligatory on Muslims, but they were resoundingly defeated.
