Vice President: Healthy Sense And Clean Heart Key To Caring For The Nation

JAKARTA - Vice President Ma'ruf Amin said a healthy mind and a clean heart are the keys in caring for the nation to avoid conflict.

"So, losing common sense, his heart is not clean, I think this is the source of irregularities or conflicts. This is what we must voice," said the Vice President when receiving an audience of a number of national figures at the Vice President's Palace, Jakarta, reported by ANTARA, Thursday, January 11.

The figures are Sinta Nuriyah Abdurrahman Wahid, Quraish Shihab, Lukman Hakim Saifuddin, Karlina Rohima Supelli, Makarim Wibisono, Cardinal Suharyo, Pastor Gomar Gultom, and Alissa Wahid.

During the meeting, the Vice President expressed his appreciation to the interfaith leaders who were present to bring the idea of the Nation's Conscience Movement as an effort to maintain and care for the Indonesian nation.

"I am very happy because there are still many figures who want to try to protect this nation. If it is no longer there, I think the condition of the Indonesian nation in the future will be more severe because no one wants to voice the truth and goodness," he said.

One of the closest challenges in maintaining the integrity of the nation, said the Vice President, is the 2024 election contestation.

According to Ma'ruf Amin, elections can lead to polarization of society which leads to divisions.

Therefore, he emphasized that the role of national figures at this time is very necessary, especially to remind people to continue to be able to maintain the boundaries of differences in political choices in corridors that do not cause conflict.

"I think these figures must continue to make efforts through various meetings, forums, to voice what kind of safeguarding and maintaining the integrity of this nation should be," he said.

The vice president said that division was tantamount to betraying the struggles of the founding fathers of the nation who had struggled to unite all differences in the past.

"You can imagine a country as wide as this can be united, it's not an easy job in my opinion. What was the time with limited means of communication and transportation, but it was extraordinary to be able to unite various ethnicities and religions through national agreements," he said.

Sinta Nuriyah Abdurrahman Wahid, wife of the fourth president of the Republic of Indonesia Abdurrahman Wahid, expressed his concern, especially regarding the situation ahead of the election and there are still conflicts in the country, such as in Papua.

"This all makes us concerned about how to deal with it because all of these are the children of the Indonesian nation we love. Therefore, we are moved to see a situation like this, we have thoughts to establish a movement that we call the Nation's Conscience Movement," he said.

This movement, said Sinta Nuriyah, aims to invite national leaders to continue to move while maintaining their commitment to caring for the nation and state for future generations.

"At least we can provide examples and sovereignty to the younger generation so that they can imitate and imitate what national figures are doing to care for and protect the Indonesian nation as well as possible," he said.

Meanwhile, senior cleric Quraish Shihab expressed his view that human conscience basically consists of three things, namely justice, trust, and respect for parents.

"When calling this (the Nation's Conscience Movement), actually our direction there (justice, trust, and respect for parents). We want this justice to touch all parties, we want that mandate to be upheld, and we want to respect our parents who have contributed," explained Quraish Shihab.

On the same occasion, Cardinal Suharyo reminded the importance of three words that have the same roots as the key to caring for the nation. The three words are the khalik (the creator), the creature (God's creation), and the noble morals.

"We all hope that when a person realizes himself as a creature, to the Creator (The Creator), he must pray prostrate and worship, and to the environment, world, and others in life together and have noble character," said Suharyo.

Therefore, said Suharyo, the basic morality aspect has become very decisive in efforts to care for the nation.

"We can talk about the economy, talk about culture, and so on, but if this basic understanding does not grow, the morality is not strong, then all of them (in order to care for the nation) feel fragile," he said.