A History Of Thailand

by Baker Chris

  More government funds were invested in rural uplift to remove the rationale for communism. The Fifth Plan (1981–86) for the first time included greater social and economic equity as an objective on grounds of ‘national security’. A poverty programme identified the 12 652 poorest villages (60 per cent in the northeast) and showered them with water supply, roads, schools, irrigation, electrification, and soil improvement. General Chavalit oversaw an Isan khieo (Green northeast) scheme under which the army built small irrigation works and other development projects. None of this stemmed the trend to growing inequality. Similarly, the avowed attempt to restrain capital came to little. The Fifth Plan vowed to break up monopolies in banking and industry, but nothing resulted.

  The army oversaw a network of propaganda and surveillance, especially in the countryside. The Village Scouts were revived after a short lull. They continued to receive royal patronage and counted 3 million members in the early 1980s. In 1978, the ISOC set up the Thai National Defence Volunteers, which trained and armed around 50 000 villagers to act as informants and vigilantes. The Red Gaurs, rangers, and several other groups operated alongside. Army radio broadcast propaganda morning and evening from the loudspeakers erected at the centre of every village. Rural activists were quietly dealt with. A deputy head of the ISOC explained later how they operated in these years: ‘we had a “hunting unit”. It was easy. We got a list of communist leaders, then…bang! That’s it. Then we went home and rested’.8

  Monarchy transcendent

  With the support of Prem and efforts of the National Identity Office, the king’s public role in the polity expanded further, in three main aspects. First, in keeping with the rural emphasis and his own interests, the king concentrated increasingly on the ‘royal projects’ of village uplift. In 1980, the government began to contribute to these projects from the regular budget as part of the overall strategy of rural development. An office was created in the planning board. Top officials in the Irrigation Department were seconded. Six development centres were built at regional palaces. The range of activities expanded from the earlier emphasis on irrigation and hill peoples to encompass rural projects of all kinds. Pictures of the king and other royal family members engaged in these activities figured prominently in the television news.

  The king championed the small farmer in the face of accelerating change and growing urbanization. In 1991, he said: ‘We do not want to be one of those very advanced countries…because if we are a highly advanced country, there is only one way to go: backwards…if we use a “poor man’s” method of administration, without being too dogmatic about theory, but with the spirit of unity in mind, that is, mutual tolerance, we will have more stability’.9 In 1994, he unveiled a scheme to make small farmers totally self-reliant and independent of markets through a mixed and integrated organic farm. Queen Sirikit explained: ‘Misunderstandings arise between people in rural areas and the rich, so-called civilized people in Bangkok…we try to fill that gap’.10 In 1984, the NIO dubbed Bhumibol the ‘Farmer King’ and ‘Developer King’.

  In the mid-1990s, the king also turned his attention to urban problems, seeking solutions to the problems of flooding in sinking Bangkok, and identifying sites for new highways to unclog the traffic. But the public projection of the king as developer in television and print still focused on his rural role, including testimonials from the beneficiaries of the royal projects.

  The second role of the king was as the focus of public ceremonial on an even larger scale than before. The bicentenary of Bangkok was celebrated in 1982, complete with a glittering royal barge procession. Seven hundred years of the Sukhothai king’s legendary invention of the Thai alphabet were celebrated a year later. These were followed by the king’s fifth cycle (60th birthday) in 1987; the longest reign of any Thai monarch (1988), and of any living monarch in the world (1992); the funeral of the king’s mother (1995); the reign’s jubilee (1996); the king’s sixth cycle (72nd birthday, 1999); the queen’s (2004); 60th anniversary of the reign (2006); and the king’s seventh cycle (84th birthday, 2011). The monarchy also figured strongly in the Year of Promoting Thai Culture, which the NIO orchestrated in 1994. By the late 1990s, the old city on Rattanakosin Island was a site of almost constant royal celebration. The municipality drew up plans to return the area to its late 18th-century layout, ostensibly to promote tourism, but also to reclaim some sacred space from later intrusions, such as Thammasat University with its connection to the revolution of 1932. Prostration became fashionable again in the court. Any possibility of criticism of the sort that royalty faced in the 1920s was prevented by use of lèse majesté laws.

  Third, the monarchy was even more strongly associated with orthodox Buddhism. Mass television brought the main events of the royal ritual calendar into the home. The Department of Fine Arts revived interest in the Traiphum Phra Ruang, the Sukhothai-era text that justified monarchy and social hierarchy in terms of unequal religious merit. A 1983 conference discussed the text’s relevance to contemporary life, government, and ‘national security’. The king took an interest in the monastic lineage of Acharn Man Phurithatto, a northeastern monk who had practised intense asceticism and meditation. Acharn Man had died in 1949, and his disciples soon after claimed he had achieved the status of arahant or Buddhist saint. Devotees from the upper ranks of business and bureaucracy had begun to patronize his monastic lineage since the 1960s. The king invited surviving members of the lineage to Bangkok, built a retreat for them in the palace grounds, visited the Sakon Nakhon wat where Acharn Man had died, and presided over funerary rites for three disciples.

  In 1987, a palace Memoir of the king published for his fifth cycle noted that, since Sukhothai, the Thai monarch had ruled ‘not out of any divine right, but by the consent of his fellow peers’, and hence ‘a Thai King is judged by the sole criterion of how much benefit and happiness he could bring to the country’.11 The king repeated this theory of spontaneous election in interviews with foreign journalists, suggesting: ‘If the people do not want me, they can throw me out, eh?’12

  The king’s birthday speeches and other public addresses attracted more attention and became more like sermons. They constantly returned to the theme of unity and the need for good people to rule the country. At times he showed displeasure at the institutionalized disunity in representative democracy and political party competition: ‘between these two sides there is only talk, talk, talk, talk and they argue, argue, argue’.13 His aides and courtiers were often more explicit. Tongnoi Tongyai, a royal secretary, claimed that Thailand’s constitutions were ‘French in foundation and American in ideal’.14 The NIO echoed that constitutions were ‘an alien concept’.15

  In 1995, the king published his own adaptation of one of the traditional jataka tales about the previous lives of the Buddha. In the story, Prince Mahajanaka loses his kingdom but then regains it through a test that reveals his magical kingly power. He reigns for thousands of years but then becomes aware of the meaninglessness of wealth and retires to an ascetic life. Bhumibol changed the traditional version by inserting a didactic speech on the theme of perseverance, and by delaying Mahajanaka’s retreat to asceticism until he has first weaned his people from destructive acquisitiveness through education and through sustainable development using traditional technology. Mahajanaka explains this is necessary because everyone ‘from the horse handlers to the Viceroy, and especially the courtiers are all ignorant’.16

  With the passing of his senior royal advisers (Dhani died in 1974), the king gathered a new cadre who were distinguished not by royal blood but by prominence in modern society. They included soldiers from the Cold War era (notably, Prem), technocrats who shared his view of development and society, business leaders often from the great Thai–Chinese lineages of the late 19th century, and jurists expert on constitutions and legislation.

  With his image of devotion to the peasantry, constant ceremonial presence, promotion as the centrepiece of national identity, and increasing longevity, the king’s b
arami (charisma, innate authority) steadily increased. With his European upbringing he had begun in the style of the Fourth to Seventh Reigns as a symbol of westernized modernism. But with Dhani’s initial urging and thereafter on his own, he had become more a symbol of tradition in the face of change. Under Sarit, this traditionalism had been promoted by military and business in the face of communism, with the king portrayed as the paternal ruler of a nation of loyal and untroublesome peasants. But, as communism declined and the peasantry became both smaller and more truculent, this image lost its power. The new generation of courtiers and royal supporters celebrated the monarch as a modern thammaracha and a moral counterweight to the excesses of military and business. A book for the 1996 jubilee, Thailand’s Guiding Light, described the king as a ‘beacon of hope.…symbol of unity…pillar of stability’, working to overcome ‘the “forces of greed” represented by the collaboration of unscrupulous private investors, politicians, and public officials’.17 The monarchy had been reinvented as the hope of a new urban middle class.

  In 2005, a bureaucrat-cum-politician published a book, Phraratcha-amnat (Royal Powers), claiming that ‘The constitution is not above the king in any way…The status of the king does not come under the constitution’.18 The book argued that the 1932 revolution had failed and ‘the Thai people do not yet believe in democratic theory’. The proof lay in the fact that all constitutions had to be signed by the king and in the evidence of great popular veneration for the monarch. The book was widely distributed, and carried by people in public as a political statement.

  The 60th anniversary of the reign on 9 June 2006 brought royal commemoration to a new level. Government mandated a year-long celebration. All the world’s remaining monarchs were invited, with 25 attending or sending a representative. Celebrations continued with the king’s 80th birthday in 2007. Wearing of yellow, the colour associated with Monday, the king’s birthday, became a way of publicly displaying loyalty. Whether because of the book or the yellow shirt, the symbolic power of the monarchy had become a factor in the new public politics of the era.

  The business of politics

  In their different ways, the mandarin ideologues of the NIO, the political soldiers, and the new royalists imagined the state constraining the rise of business on behalf of a bewildered peasant. Reality was rather different. Once an elective parliament was restored in 1979, businesspeople jumped at the opportunity it presented them. The military’s suppression of any form of political organization among peasants or workers delivered the parliament into the hands of commerce. The proportion of Assembly seats occupied by businesspeople rose from one-third in 1979 to two-thirds in 1988.

  Three parties dominated through the 1980s: Social Action, Democrat, and Chat Thai (Thai Nation). Each was led by someone with a title signifying old forms of hierarchy: the royal-related Pramoj brothers, Kukrit and Seni, and General Chatichai Choonhavan, respectively. But the financial support and dynamism of these parties came from Bangkok’s business community. Social Action attracted ‘modern’ businesspeople, often in partnerships with western firms. Chat Thai was centred on the textile industry and other joint ventures with the Japanese. The Democrats were weighted towards agribusiness. The banks, which still dominated the business world, stayed unaligned but also unmatched in influence over all parties.

  While Bangkok business initially dominated these parties, over the 1980s it was displaced by provincial business. Ninety per cent of MPs were returned by upcountry constituencies. Local business figures, borne up by the expansion of the provincial economy, gradually claimed these seats, and then also control of the main parties.

  Until the 1950s, most provincial towns were administrative centres with populations of a few thousand and only petty commerce. Since the 1960s, they had been transformed – first by the rising cash-crop trade; then in some places by the US spending on its bases; then by government investments in infrastructure (roads, schools) to tie the localities more closely to the nation; and finally by rising demand for transport, retail, services, and entertainment. Some of the successful provincial entrepreneurs came from old noble and bureaucrat families. Many more were second- or third-generation Chinese immigrants. Laws and regulations imposed little restraint on business practices. The biggest profits were often made in areas that straddled the line dividing the legal and the illegal (logging), or that were clearly criminal (smuggling, illegal gambling), or that required official cooperation (contracting, land development). Because such businesses often delivered the highest profits, some of the most prominent local figures were those involved in them. They needed help from local officialdom in the form of protection from the law, advantages over competition, and assistance to overcome bureaucratic and legal barriers. They paid for this aid by sharing some of the profits with officials, but also by supporting the state’s campaigns of surveillance and propaganda. Local businesspeople were major supporters of the Village Scouts.

  The rising provincial businesspeople grew not only rich but also powerful. They developed close connections with the stratum of village-level traders, contractors, and village heads who served as the channel through which crops and other resources were siphoned out of the villages, and government schemes of patronage and propaganda imposed on them. Through cooperation with local officialdom, they had access to the semi-official armed forces that enforced the military government’s policies of control. They reinvested some of their profits in local patronage – sponsoring funerals, subsidizing schools, helping out in times of sickness – which supplemented the government’s sparse provision of social services. They were increasingly referred to as itthiphon (influence), itthiphon muet (dark influence), or jao pho. This last term originally referred to a local spirit and alluded to supernatural power to act above the law. It was also an exact translation of ‘godfather’ and was used for the Thai version of the Hollywood film. A police general noted: ‘The structure of a godfather’s power is like a pyramid. At the top is the man with influence. At the left and right bases of the pyramid are hired gunmen and officials who support the godfather’.19 Official connections, access to violence, and the lack of law were the basis of rapid primitive accumulation. They were also the basis for success in electoral politics.

  At elections, ambitious new provincial businesspeople used village-level networks, cash, official backing, pork-barrel offers to fund local projects, intimidation, and sometimes chicanery (ballot stuffing) to gain votes. Local electorates chose them perhaps for immediate rewards (vote-buying), perhaps because a strong, ambitious representative was more likely to bring benefits back from Bangkok to the locality. At each successive election (1979, 1983, 1986, 1988), more of the MPs were provincial businesspeople. One of the most prominent was Banharn Silpa-archa, a second-generation Chinese, raised in the market of Suphanburi. He made his first fortune by gaining a monopoly on selling chlorine for municipal water supply. He extended into construction contracting, and then into land dealing, transport, petrol stations, and other businesses in the locality. He was first elected MP in 1975 and concentrated on gaining an abnormal share of budget funds for Suphanburi. His businesses rose on the results, and the grateful citizens voted him back at every opportunity.

  The provincial MPs were able to distribute budget spending away from the centre and, rather haphazardly, spread it more widely. Their role attached the provinces politically to the centre more tightly than decades of administrative plans. At the same time, parliament gave such new MPs a higher social status, broader access to business opportunities, and higher levels of protection. Laws were passed in 1979 and 1983 to force them into parties, but in reality these parties were little more than factional groupings jockeying for access to the Cabinet and government decision-making. While soldiers and technocrats monopolized the principal ministries, the business parties competed to control the lesser ones, especially those with substantial capital budgets for construction and procurement (education, transport), or those with rule-making powers that framed business
opportunities (agriculture, industry). The parliament became a clearing house for business deals, especially construction contracts. Its operation reflected this commercial logic. Candidates invested heavily in elections, and then sought ways to recoup through corruption or business profits inflated by political advantages. Parties were held together by regular payments from the leader. By the 1990s, elections were preceded by a transfer season of competitive bidding. Money was occasionally distributed to influence specific parliamentary votes. Prem reshuffled the Cabinet on a roughly yearly basis, and called elections on a two-and-a-half-year rhythm, to allow competing factions to share the benefits. The system was dubbed ‘money politics’.

  Business against military: the Chatichai Cabinet, 1988–91

  Over the eight years of Premocracy, the relationship between business and military soured. After Prem tamed the ‘political soldiers’, old-style generals rose back to prominence. With the ending of US patronage, the military relied on the national budget both for legitimate funding and secondary incomes. Its share of the total budget rose from 17 per cent in 1975 to 22 per cent a decade later. With increasing confidence from their base in parliament, business politicians wanted to divert these funds to economic growth. They also resented the generals’ sinecures in the management of state enterprises and their domination of electronic media. The press began to raise questions about corrupt commissions on arms deals and other profiteering from the generals’ privileged positions in the state apparatus.

  From 1984, MPs launched attacks on the size and secrecy of the military budget. In 1985 and 1987, they defeated attempts by the military to extend the constitutional clauses that underpinned the military’s political influence. At the 1988 election, the press and political parties launched a campaign for General Prem to retire and allow an elected MP to rise to the premiership. Prem reluctantly concurred, and Chatichai Choonhavan succeeded him.