INAUGURATION OF THE 2025 GP ANSOR INDRAMAYU, STRENGTHENING STRUCTURAL AND CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS
By: H. Adlan Daie
Political and socio-religious analyst
Congratulations on the inauguration and inauguration of the Indramayu Regency Ansor Youth Movement (GP) management for the 2024-2028 term, at the PCNU Indramayu Da’wah Building, Saturday (November 29, 2025).
Under the leadership of Gus Ulin Ni’am, GP Ansor Indramayu adopted the theme: “Renew Intention, Activate Spirit, Ansor Indramayu Together.”
From the author’s perspective, the inauguration and inauguration ceremony, with the chosen theme, represent a collective pledge to strengthen the structure and cultural foundation of a religious youth movement entity in line with the changing times and the challenges that come with it.
As the organic youth wing within the ideological epicenter of the Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) Jam’iyyah, it is crucial for Ansor Indramayu to live up to its role as a civil society movement for people empowerment, guiding the congregation in the religious sphere, and strengthening NU’s political work at the level of “national politics.”
This is where the importance of actualizing Ansor’s role in the public sphere lies, within the context of principled, strategic, tactical, and pragmatic working relationships. These four relationships are equally important, in terms of their “situational specificity,” amidst the phenomenon of social disruption within NU’s ideological framework.
The “pragmatic” relationship here is not in the context of opportunistic political pragmatism, but rather in the context of Ansor’s beneficial contribution to empowering the people and the community through collaborative relationships with “other parties,” both government and private institutions.
The launch of BUMA (Ansor-Owned Enterprises), a ferry to Biawak Island, an MOU with BAZNAS for economic empowerment, and the delivery of combine harvesters and tractors from the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture, should be viewed as pilot projects, a way for Ansor to “enter” the new social ecosystem.
This is the path of expanding Ansor Indramayu’s service choices into the economic, technological, and empowerment sectors. In the context of Greg Barton’s theory, an observer of NU, these three are instrumental variables guiding NU’s contribution space and the organic instruments within it to be culturally grounded in the religious sphere and national political work.
The “CESDA” (Center for Statistics and Data Analysis), a Cirebon-based survey institution with experience collaborating with the Kompas daily newspaper on the 2024 election survey, conducted a public opinion survey in June 2025 to determine the priorities of Indramayu residents in their list of social problems.
According to the findings of the “CESDA” survey, the author, a political consultant, identified 17 social problems facing Indramayu residents, the top five priorities were poverty, job shortages, damaged infrastructure, clean water, and basic necessities.
Other data, based on Statistics Indonesia (BPS) data at the end of 2024, shows that the poverty rate in Indramayu was 11.93%, the highest in West Java, equivalent to 240,000 people out of a total population of 1.9 million. This means that 240,000 Indramayu residents, according to BPS standards, earn less than 20,000 rupiah per day, the equivalent of a cup of coffee at an Indramayu cafe.
The labor force in Indramayu (BPS – August 2024) is 929,000 people. 263,000 (28.6%) of these are “formal workers,” namely civil servants (ASN), PPPK (Regional Employment Employment Agency), factory workers, etc., receiving formal monthly salaries. The remaining 500,000 are “casual laborers,” without monthly salaries, without BPJS (Social Security) protection, and “open unemployment” (6.2%).
If Ansor Indramayu can address even 5% of the social problems of poverty and labor force inequality, inversely proportional to the absorption capacity of the aforementioned job growth, it would be an extraordinary extra effort, but that is where Ansor Indramayu’s glory lies.
Certainly, taking up this role means strengthening Ansor Indramayu’s strategic, tactical, and pragmatic collaborative relationships with government institutions, the private sector, and the business world. This will narrow the scope for the actualization of “radicalism” and social “intolerance” that have long been the focus of the Ansor movement.
Facing the threat of “radicalism” and “intolerance,” as constructed by Samuel Huntington’s political sociology analysis, cannot be addressed solely by the power of a single religious narrative but must be intertwined with solutions to other social problems.
Congratulations, maximum dedication will not betray optimal results.
Indramayu, December 1, 2025
Wassalam.
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