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First there was the economic Tsunami of the recent global economic crisis. Indonesia seems to have skirted around its worst excesses.  There were the impressively peaceful legislative and presidential elections. Indonesia produced a major shift in party alliances. It also gave a landslide victory to its incumbent president. This was all good news. For a while it even seemed that the president’s high-profile antigraft campaign had a serious chance of success. But the humiliating decapitation of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), a major invention of the last government, has left the public reeling in disbelief.

The recent arrest of two KPK deputy chairmen by what appears to be an unusually diligent and dedicated police force, and the scores of legal eminence grise and literati that have subsequently leapt publicly to their defense, only magnifies the suspicion of conspiracy theorists. The gruesome, tawdry details of the alleged murder committed by the hapless former chief of the KPK, the once feted and revered Antasari Azhar, magnifies the credibility gap.

In extreme versions of the conspiracy theory, one could add the suspicion that the slow but decisive destruction of the KPK is a safeguard against such instruments being let loose in the future against ministers and presidents as soon as they leave office. After all, the early enthusiasm and the excessive zeal of the KPK has already produced the desired political effect. Remember what happened first in Korea, then in Taiwan?

The jailing of Aulia Pohan, father-in-law to the president’s son, a particularly close relation in most Asian societies, in an election year magnified the political impact. Such things would never have been allowed to happen under Suharto. This was a sea change. It was the trump card of the election campaign. The country duly obliged. The president sailed into office on a wave of public approval.

But times do change. The mighty do fall. The KPK, the guardian of our public conscience and the symbol of the president’s own gift to the nation, is now locked in a battle of survival with none other than the police, the Antichrist to anticorruption campaigners. Its morale has been severely weakened. Its strength is spent. Its leadership is in near disintegration.

This is exactly what the enemies of the antigraft program hope. That hope can be extinguished by an emboldened second-term president. Bringing an end to kleptocracy, and the obliging governments it tends to buy, would be the real proof of an Indonesia at home in a new democratic age. It is the best legacy that any administration could bequeath to the nation. Something less would leave behind an Indonesia with iron in its soul.

It is useless to pretend that this is an easy task. It is utopian to think that a constitutionally powerful president with a national legislature in the bag can painlessly end the suffering of the KPK. To understand the enormity of the challenge it is good to steer clear of conspiracy theories.

By all accounts, corruption in Indonesia has reached systemic proportions. It has been steadily nurtured over a period of four decades as an indispensable instrument of patron-client politics. In this respect Indonesian corruption is rather different from that under a Mobutu or a Mugabe. Our organs of state such as the civil service and the military were encouraged to enrich themselves, as the state paid only a small proportion of their annual expenditure. High functionaries stole public houses and public land at nominal cost. The seamless interweaving of military and business interests, begun during the New Order’s formative years, did the rest.

In the end, the definition of corruption itself became blurred and lost much of its meaning. If one applied the commonly used definition of corruption as being the use of public office for private gain, who could tell who was corrupt and who was not? The public, long robbed of its civic rights and used to considering the provision of public services as a government favor, was accustomed to paying for such services day after day in myriad little ways.

Democracy’s arrival has put a spoke in such self-serving logic. Ordinary people, like the biblical camel, have begun to recognize corruption when they see it. Democracy has given them a voice. The impact of electronic media and the end of the economic miracle have placed a premium on the construction of an effective democratic order. Dictatorship is decisively not in vogue.

It all began as usual with constitutional reform. The 1945 Constitution, revered as a symbol of national unity, was preserved in form. It was transformed dramatically in substance. Yet it remained reformasi on autopilot. There was no game plan, no grand design, no philosophical or social revolution, no national catharsis. The advance of Indonesian democracy was full of inter-institutional fights and stresses, of moves and counter moves: legislature against executive, center against regions, provinces against districts, military against police and the judiciary against everyone. Knowing how to exorcise the tumor of corruption from a still-evolving body politic is far from easy. The earnestness of social activists is no substitute for clear-minded public policy.

Lessons of history only muddy the waters. The battle against corruption has been waged since ancient times. All the major empires of the known world — Chinese, Indian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, French and British — struggled against their pervasive decadence for most of their existence. All political systems from Western democracy to Eastern communism were corroded by it. Large institutions of state, commerce and religion are no exceptions. Successes are few. Compromises rule the day.

In a “democracy under construction,” the fate of single institutions however high-profile cannot be settled by executive order or fiat. Whatever the outcome of the current impasse, the KPK is already fatally weakened. So is public patience with the ad-hoc approach to solving institutional problems. If the allegations against the leadership of the KPK are true, they raise serious questions over the extraordinary errors of judgment in the selection of such senior officials. If they are not, it calls into question the wisdom of creating new institutions without reforming the old. There is no way to return to business as usual.

The good news is that we have a strong and politically legitimate presidency. The impetuosity of political reconstruction can give way to a studied evaluation of what has gone wrong. It is a rare opportunity both to unleash a sweeping reform of the police and to introduce a more convincing approach to anticorruption. Transferring personnel, changing terms of reference and tinkering with government regulations will be of little use. It is worth remembering that the largest number of anticorruption laws and varieties of anticorruption instruments was found in one of Asia’s most infamous kleptocracies, Marcos’s Philippines.

There is a case to be made for abandoning one’s comfort zone in Indonesian democracy. The time has come to take a long bold view. The KPK debacle provides an opportunity to reappraise our approach to anticorruption with its emphasis on the arrest of the “big boys” and the repatriation of big money. On its own, this is not enough. The answer lies in a national campaign against corruption. One that provides the public with credible instruments of protest, one that enables it to refuse to pay bribes and illegal charges, to monitor day-to-day instances of official extortion, to praise those who resist and to shame those who pay. Some of the greatest battles in democratic freedom, from South Africa to the United States, from the cities of the former Soviet Union to the villages of India, have been won by civil disobedience and civic protest. Given the current public mood it is unlikely that Indonesia will be an exception.

Satish Mishra is managing director of Jakarta-based consultancy Strategic Asia.