A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  Figure 15: The execution of Khrong Chandawong and Thongphan Suthimat, by Sarit’s personal order, on 31 May 1961 at an airfield in Sakon Nakhon.

  In the four southernmost provinces, a majority of people practised Islam and spoke a Malay dialect. Since the 1930s, the Phibun governments had tried to impose Thai language and Thai dress, and to close down local community schools and Islamic courts. Resistance was led by religious leaders who took their inspiration from contemporary anti-colonial movements in the Islamic world. Some appealed to the colonial British in Malaya for help. Some petitioned for a federal structure that would allow them to preserve the area’s distinctive culture within Thailand. The most prominent of these leaders, Haji Sulong Tomina, was charged with treason in 1948, prompting a revolt in Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat in which hundreds died over six months. Haji Sulong was jailed and then probably assassinated by Phao’s police in 1954. Teachers led resistance by founding pondok schools, which taught in local dialect and according to Islamic principles, while community leaders, such as Haji Sulong’s son, were elected MPs and raised Muslim demands in parliament. As in the northeast, Sarit accused them of plotting a separatist revolt and threw the leaders into jail. After release, they and many others fled into Malaysia. Underground organizations were formed to support Islam and socialism. In Pattani, which had been the centre of a Muslim Sultanate for over three centuries before 1900, a movement appeared in 1968, headed by a former local aristocrat educated in south Asia, and dedicated to creating an independent Islamic state.

  The northern hills were inhabited by around a quarter of a million hill peoples, mostly practising shifting cultivation in the forests. Since the 1940s, several villages had begun growing opium for international trade. In 1959, the government set out a plan to stop opium growing, stabilize shifting farmers, recruit hill peoples ‘to maintain the security of national frontiers’, and in other ways make them ‘contribute to national development’.3 Teachers were posted into the hills to transform them into Thai-speaking loyal citizens, and monks were sent under a thammajarik (teaching the thamma) programme to convert them to Buddhism. In parallel with these efforts, millenarian ideas spread about the coming of a ‘Hmong King’ who would bring prosperity and justice. In 1967–68, a full-scale Hmong rebellion spread across four provinces of the north. The army reacted by bombing and napalming hill villages.

  Equipped with bigger budgets and better means of communication, the militarized nation-state believed it could realize the imagined unity of a homogenous nation of Thai-speaking, loyal, development-pursuing Buddhist peasants throughout the area enclosed within the national borders. Many communities in areas only recently annexed to the Bangkok heartland, and even more recently subject to government control, felt they belonged to a different world from that imagined by the Thai state. They were provoked into re-examining and re-emphasizing their own very different identities.

  Monarchy resurgent

  Sarit and the USA oversaw a revival of the monarchy following its partial eclipse since 1932. Both the generals and their US patrons believed the monarchy would serve as a focus of unity, and a force for stability, while remaining susceptible to their control. The process began in earnest once Phibun was removed from power in 1957. But the roots of the revival were laid in the late 1940s.

  In December 1945, Prince Dhani Nivat, former royalist minister and now one of the senior palace advisers, delivered a lecture on Siamese kingship attended by the young King Ananda Mahidol and his family. Dhani constructed a Sukhothai model of a naturally elected king who follows the 10 royal virtues and ‘justifies himself as the King of Righteousness’.4 He emphasized the monarch as the protector of the people and of Buddhism. This represented a departure from the idea of the king as embodiment of the nation, as promoted from the Fifth to Seventh Reigns, and a return to the theory popular at the start of the Bangkok era.

  Dhani also slated constitutions as ‘a pure foreign conception’, with no place in Thai tradition because the king’s inherent morality and wisdom were the true source of law. He summed up: ‘Our national prosperity and independence in the first 150 years of the Bangkok era (1782–1932) was the result of the wisdom and statecraft of our kings. And I cannot see how we can maintain such a state of affairs without good kings’. Another returned royalist asserted that ‘representatives of the people are elected individually by certain groups of people and they do not, in fact, represent the whole people’ as only the king could.5

  Dhani noted that traditionally the monarchy was ‘ever kept before the public eye in literature, in sermons, and in every other channel of publicity’. He and the other senior royalist (and regent), Prince Rangsit, orchestrated a new ritual dramatization of monarchy and a further extension of Damrong’s project of public exposure of the royal body. The first days of Ananda Mahidol’s temporary return from exile were crammed with ritual performances. The remainder was peppered with staged interactions with groups of subjects – receptions for high officials, visits to military camps, meetings with Muslim and Chinese leaders, a talk on radio, and forays into the countryside to meet the people. The short visit was a prelude to the new version of monarchy, steeped in ritual but tinged with populism, sharply different from the pre-1932 model of modernity, westernization, and distance.

  After Ananda Mahidol’s unexplained death in 1946, the succession passed to his younger brother, Bhumibol Adulyadej, who returned to Switzerland to complete his education. He visited Thailand briefly during March–May 1950 for another flurry of ritual, including his coronation and marriage. But after Bhumibol’s permanent return in 1951, the royal revival was temporarily slowed. Phibun blocked the royalist politicians’ attempt to reinstate royal power through the constitution, and through the 1950s restricted the king’s public duties to the rituals that established the essential specialness of the monarchy. Outside that, the king dabbled in painting, sailing, photography, and jazz.

  All that changed with Sarit’s coup in 1957. Initially, the king, like the Americans, had reportedly considered Sarit ‘corrupt and uncouth’.6 But Sarit belonged to a later military generation with no involvement in the revolution of 1932. During the mid-1950s, he had quietly distanced himself from Phibun’s antagonism to the throne. On the eve of both his 1957 and 1958 coups, Sarit visited the king. On the day of the 1957 coup, the king named Sarit as ‘Defender of the Capital’, and Sarit displayed this decree as legitimation. On the following day, Sarit visited the palace and the king issued a message of support and encouragement. After the 1958 coup, Sarit declared, ‘In this revolution, certain institutions must be changed, but one institution which the Revolutionary Council will never allow to be changed is the institution of the monarchy.’7

  Sarit scrapped Phibun’s land Act, which the king had opposed, and switched National Day from the day of the 1932 revolution to the king’s birthday. He showed he believed that power radiated downwards from the monarch, rather than upwards from the people: ‘The ruler is none other than the head of that big family who must regard all the people as his own children and grandchildren’.8 Thanat Khoman, later Sarit’s foreign minister, explained:

  The fundamental cause of our political instability in the past lies in the sudden transplantation of alien institutions on to our soil…If we look at our national history, we can see very well that this country works better and prospers under an authority, not a tyrannical authority, but a unifying authority around which all elements of the nation can rally.9

  Sarit encouraged expansion of the royal role. In 1955, Phibun had allowed the king to make a tour to the northeast, which attracted large crowds. From 1958, these tours became a regular event and took in all regions of the country. He also travelled overseas on state visits that advertised Thailand as a traditional but modernizing country cleaving to the ‘free world’. The king’s attention to the ritual foundations of kingship also became more public and more widely spread. He resumed the custom of presenting kathin robes to monks in the capital, and later beyond. He
revived the glittering royal barge procession that dramatized this event. He presented Buddha images, tablets, and amulets to wat and offices during his provincial tours. Later, he appointed royal representatives to convey the royal kathin robes and the Buddha images to a wider range of places. The USA contributed by reproducing pictures of the king for distribution all over the country.

  In 1962, Sarit amended the Sangha Act, overthrowing Phibun’s 1944 reform, returning roughly to Chulalongkorn’s 1902 organization of the Sangha, and restoring Mongkut’s Thammayut sect to a privileged position. Sarit had Phra Phimontham, a Mahanikai (that is, mainstream) monk who advocated a more democratic Sangha, arraigned as a communist, forcibly disrobed, and thrown into jail. The Ministry of Education was entrusted to Pin Malakun, a royal family member and enthusiastic royalist who had returned from exile in the post-war era. School textbooks were revised to emphasize the king as the focal point of the nation.

  The king cultivated an interest in rural development. After his return from Europe in 1951, Prince Dhani had arranged for Phya Anuman Rajadhon to tutor him on Thai culture. Anuman was a tax official and remarkable amateur scholar who had collected folk tales, written a detailed account of the annual rural cycle of cultivation and ritual, and studied the blending of animism and Buddhism in everyday rural life. Against a background of urban growth and great rural changes, Anuman imagined a ‘self-contained’ village life only superficially changed by modernity:

  The important thing for all humans is the desire for happiness, fun, and comfort. To speak only of farmers, if they are not addicted to evil ways, such as gambling, they have not a little happiness, because they have few needs. It is happiness deriving from their surroundings, namely nature. When they have enough to eat and enough to use they are happy…I have told the life of the farmers, which is a simple, smooth life, not adventurous, not progressive, not wealthy, and not powerful. However things are, they go on like that.10

  Around 1960, the king set up a fishery, an experimental farm, and a dairy project inside the Bangkok palace. He planned an irrigation project close to his beachfront palace in Hua Hin, and became enthusiastic about the potential for irrigation to transform small-scale farming. He recruited technical help inside the Irrigation Department, and began to identify and promote projects during his provincial tours. On trips to the north in the 1960s, he developed another interest in the hill peoples and in projects to replace opium growing by new crops (Figure 16). The queen promoted hill peoples’ handicrafts.

  Figure 16: The king (shown here wearing glasses) as developer, visiting villages in the 1970s, discussing opium replacement and water projects.

  The king’s own home movies from these trips were shown on the new medium of television. Pin Malakun, who also oversaw broadcasting, recognized the potential of this material, and soon film of the king visiting villages was regularly shown. In an axis stretching from Phya Anuman’s folklore to Pin Malakun’s television features, Bhumibol had become the paternal, activist king of a childlike, quiescent peasantry.

  The king established a new range of gifting relationships with various social groups. In the late 1950s, he led several appeals for relief of disasters, including a major cholera epidemic. Over the following years, he also began to accept donations for funding his rural projects and other charities. Donating to the royal charities soon became a way to make merit, especially for rising businesspeople keen to convert some of their new wealth into social recognition. The king had already revived royal decorations, mainly for presentation to officials. Now he multiplied the classes of decorations, and extended the catchment to include charity donors and others who performed valuable services. Similarly, the circle of people who merited royal sponsorship for weddings and funerals was widened to include a broader elite. The number of functions, ceremonies, and audiences attended by the king rose from around 100 a year in the mid-1950s to 400 a year during the Sarit regime, and 600 in the early 1970s. The royal family paid special attention to their relations with the army, the senior bureaucracy, and the Buddhist establishment. But they also found occasions to interact with the business community and the growing professional middle class.

  Although the king’s rural projects were in line with the Sarit government’s theme of development, they pointedly focused on the small peasants and marginal peoples who were being crushed, confused, and by-passed by development in practice. Although the generals and the USA sponsored the royal revival, the results differed somewhat from these patrons’ intentions. The lurch to Americanization turned the monarchy into an alternative symbol of nation and tradition; the corruption of the generals and their cronies created an opportunity for the monarchy to assert a revived and modernized form of moral leadership; and the harsh results of rapid development gave the king a role as defender of the weak.

  The alignment of army, palace, and business concluded by Sarit under US patronage during 1957–58 benefited all parties. The USA secured a base. The monarchy revived. The generals enjoyed power and profit. Business boomed. But these gains did not come without costs, and without releasing new social forces.

  The left

  Before the Second World War, communist activity in Siam had been confined to Chinese groups (mainly in Bangkok) and Vietnamese groups (mainly in the northeast) acting as émigré bases promoting revolution in their home countries. A party branch was founded in the early 1930s, but only a handful of Thais were recruited. The government was relatively successful at rounding up and deporting the activists, and considered them unthreatening.

  Over the 1940s, the leftist movement was transformed into something much more powerful. Many more second-generation lukjin Chinese were recruited through teachers in the Chinese schools, especially Xinmin school. They became more involved in radicalizing Thailand, rather than supporting a revolution in China. Anti-Japanese activists arrested in 1938 spent several years ensconced in jail in the company of royalists arrested after the failed Boworadet rebellion. In this ‘jail university’, the leftists taught the aristocrats political strategy, and in return were tutored in Thai language and culture.

  The Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) was refounded in December 1942, and committed to a policy to drive out the ‘Japanese bandits’ and promote democracy. During the war, the communists organized ‘welfare associations’ in shipping, railways, docks, timber mills, and rice mills. Some groups carried out disruption and sabotage. In 1944, the CPT organized a volunteer force to lead a rising against the Japanese, cooperated with the parallel movement of the Seri Thai, and engaged in a few skirmishes before the war ended. Through such activities, Kasian Tejapira argues, in the ‘dimension of cultural political imagination…a radical anti-Japanese Chinese nationalist could possibly turn into a radical anti-Japanese Thai nationalist’.11 By the war’s end, Thailand had a communist movement dedicated to overthrowing the local political order.

  The two years following the armistice allowed the party to work in the open. Using their links with the Seri Thai, and the influence of Russia at the peace negotiations, the movement succeeded in gaining repeal of the Anti-Communist Law in October 1946. The party foreswore insurrection in favour of working through parliament and trade unions. Prasoet Sapsunthon, a Surat Thani MP who promoted the repeal, joined the party and openly proclaimed his affiliation. Against the background of post-war economic disruption, the party helped to organize labour, coordinate two large-scale strikes by rice-mill workers in 1945 and 1947, form the umbrella Association of United Workers of Thailand in April 1947, and hold the largest mass rallies to date on May Day in 1946 and 1947. The party newspaper, Mahachon (The Masses), which had circulated underground intermittently since 1942, began to appear openly as a weekly in 1944. A communist newspaper in Chinese, Chua-Min Pao, appeared in October 1945.

  Some early party members who had gone to China to fight in the revolution returned to Thailand, including Udom Srisuwan, a Christian-educated Chinese-Shan who became Mahachon’s leading columnist and the party’s main theoretic
ian. Some bright provincial students, both lukjin and Thai, who travelled to the capital for higher education were attracted to leftist ideas. Jit Phumisak, son of an excise clerk from Prachinburi, enrolled at Chulalongkorn University in 1950 and wrote a Marxist critique of Buddhism soon after. A student committee was formed at Thammasat University in 1953, and some of its members joined the party after Sarit’s 1957 coup.

  Several members of the new commoner middle class of the 1920s were drawn leftwards in this era. Supha Sirimanon, who figured among the pro-nationalist journalists from the late 1920s, became an intermittent aide to Pridi over the next 15 years and used foreign trips to acquire leftist literature. He evolved into a self-taught socialist who published one of the first Thai analyses of Marxism in 1951. The journalist and writer Kulap Saipradit, whose fiction in the late 1920s speared the aristocracy, visited Japan in the late 1930s, took a Thammasat University law degree during the war, and began translating texts from European socialism. After spending 1948–49 in Australia, he published a flurry of short stories on class divisions in Thai society. ‘Lend us a hand’ illustrates the Marxist labour theory of value: ‘Who builds everything? Is it money, or is it damn well labour that does the job?’12 Some of these convert intellectuals kept aloof from the CPT. In 1949, Supha and Kulap, in cooperation with several followers of Pridi, started a journal, Aksonsan (The Adviser), that ‘did not lead people by the nose’.13 But others went the whole way. Atsani Pholajan, member of an aristocratic family, took a law degree from Thammasat, worked as an official, wrote poems and stories for Mahachon, and joined the party in 1950.