As has been variously noted in earlier chapters, eighteen months before the Indonesian nationalist leader, Sukarno, was finally exiled ostensibly for life he was prematurely released from jail on 31 December 1931 after having been sentenced a year previously to four years' imprisonment for his nationalist activities. The decision to set him free was taken by the rather more liberally minded Governor-General de Graeff a few days before his term ended. By the time it occurred de Graeff had been replaced by a new Governor-General, de Jonge, ‘an unashamed conservative determined to tolerate no nonsense from upstart Indonesian political agitators’, who eventually decided, as we have seen, to arrest him again on 1 August 1933.

It is of considerable interest in the present context that in the course of the intervening nineteen months not only did a classic debate develop within the Indonesian national movement as to how it should now proceed, but that the parameters within which this was set were substantially determined by the new posture in Dutch policy which Sukarno's release seemed to signify.