Even cooking can bring trouble in Thailand's three-year old political imbroglio. Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej was found guilty by a Bangkok court in September of mingling political titbits while crushing chillies, breaking garlic and dicing chicken on his television cookery show.
Whether there is any merit in the charges is hard to say, but then in Thailand's poisoned politics it hardly matters, more so when the courts have in the past not been known for probity but partiality. Judges ordered his resignation, coalition MPs moved to reappoint him.
The significance of this farce lies not in the charges but in the context of the battle royale [not royal] taking place behind the political pantomime giving editors in Bangkok plenty from which to pluck melodramatic headlines. Most people are bored to tears by the saga.
Boredom is unfortunate because at stake in this tragedy is the survival of, battered as it is, democracy.
This is the crisis of politics in Thailand, not the war of words and occasional punch-up between rival demonstrators filling frontpages and leading news broadcasts which predict the downfall of Sundaravej and his government.
The first act in this drama opened in 1997 with the promulgation of a constitution drafted with widespread public consultation. It instituted an electoral system to deliver strong government in place of the shaky coalitions rarely lasting more than a year which had characterized previous bouts of electoral politics sandwiched between dictatorships. It also put in place, albeit imperfect, checks-and-balances on state power.
This constitution was the keystone cementing the facets of the great transition of politics and society now taking place in Thailand.
‘Modernizers’ led by the ambitious telecoms magnate Thaksin Shinawatra and his allies and advisers headed by Pansak Vinyaratn seized this opportunity. They built a political machine modelled on those in the west. Extensive surveys revealed the concerns of the ordinary voter, typically a farmer or factory hand. The results were crossed with the interests and ambitions of the modernizers, many of whom were like Shinawatra wealthy businessmen.
The outcome was a simple manifesto promising help for the common man. This was a revolution.
And it was very successful. It won Shinawatra the 2000 election and handed him a landslide, the first in Thai political history, in 2005 because his government kept its promises.
Money, as always, certainly played a part in those victories, but not simply through vote-buying. In any case the costs are rising and the results are less certain than they were back in the heyday of vote-buying in the 1980s and 1990s.
The modernizers, powered by capital, spent heavily on advertising using, as has often observed, the tactics of Madison Avenue to appeal to voters loyal hearts instead of their fickle wallets.
Political advertising by Thai Rak Thai and later People's Power blanketed the country, almost certainly the first time this has happened and certainly on such a scale and with such consistency.
The modernizers were building an image of a national party in a polity of local cliques and a few regional parties, of which the erroneously named Democrat Party is the best example. By advertising on such a scale the modernizers eroded the old ways and forged links directly with voters.
This challenged the ‘opportunists’, veteran provincial power-brokers and local leaders, who have for the last few decades been used to spinning through the revolving door to the cabinet and ministerial coffers. Their power has depended upon charisma, patronage and a little fear. However, being arch-opportunists they also allied with Shinawatra to get through the revolving door.
If imitation is the best form of flattery then the modernizers might have blushed. During last December's election every party had posters of bullet-point manifestos and catchy (some anyway) policy promises. Their only problem was their policies mostly bootlegged those of Thai Rak Thai. Voters went for brand, and handed a resounding victory to People's Power, the surrogate for Thai Rak Thai.
The success of the modernizers is evidence of the deep and subtle transitions in almost every sphere which are slowly and almost imperceptibly working their way through society. To draw another analogy, change in society is like a tsunami, barely a ripple until reaching the limits of the shallows, the constriction of space which concentrates its energy with such effect and surprise.
Most now have the essentials of modern life; few families are without at least one mobile phone, television, refrigerator and motorbike.
Thais have never had so much education, even if the quality is doubtful. They have never been so exposed to ideas from faraway due the country’s tourism industry, a boom in translations of western magazines, and the advance of English. Colloquial Thai is peppered by more and more corruptions of English words, each bearing a message or idea, however modest.
This is not to say that every Thai can hold forth on the merits of various approaches to democracy or indeed puts a value on human rights in the vein of international activists. Nevertheless change is there, and spreading. Indeed as Buddhists would suggest, change is paradoxically the only constant. Voters, awakened to the power of their choices by the 1997 constitution, are emerging as a force to rival the modernizers, opportunists and reactionaries.
These transitions have ripened society for modern marketing employed by the modernizers.
Limthongkul and his ilk, including many of the privileged and powerful old money, deny these transitions. Instead they attribute the success of the modernizers to cheap tricks hoodwinking the gullible, foolish and ignorant poor, whose votes now make governments. These ‘reactionaries’ insist Thailand is not ready for democracy.
Yet if the poor are incapable of making choices for their best interests, whose fault would that be? Those that have been in power, drawn from and supported by the forbearers of the reactionaries, have singularly failed to invest and reform education to relieve the poor of their supposed ignorance. It is telling that South Korea, recovering from ravages of war, was in 1960 by many yardsticks less developed than Thailand.
After forty years largely under the jackboot of brutal and corrupt leaders, South Korea had become a major industrial power and a world leader in memory chips with a boisterous democracy. This is primarily because its dictators chose to invest in education, know-how and technology. Some observers, boldly, suggest a creative force of global significance is even emerging in the Hermit Kingdom.
Thailand meanwhile is still selling sun, beaches, rice and cheap hands.
Ironically, although Shinawatra while emasculating democracy implemented policies which while imperfect – and ‘populist’ charge rivals while failing to offer anything more coherent or imaginative – probably on balance did more to improve the incomes and intellect of society than most previous governments. In the long-term, this is probably positive for the cause of democracy and a more equitable and prosperous society.
Getting there is not going to happen overnight however, and is as events of recent years show taking a tortuous and rocky path, with the most unlikely of guides Shinawatra and Sundaravej.
And this is unlikely to change while the great and the good use their fancy overseas educations and self-proclaimed intelligence to preserve their privilege and power by undermining democracy. Were they half the nationalists they pretend to be they would build an ideologically sounder and sharper alternative to counter People’s Power to foster the competition upon which thrives democracy. That would be an action truly in the national interest.
There is no alternative. Autocracies in the long run fail, often bloodily so. Democracies endure because they deliver a modicum of choice, opportunity, fairness and above all equality of political and legal rights which give rise to a sense of justice.
There is sadly a conspicuous lack of justice in Thailand. Probity and impartiality are not traits typically associated with its courts, which regularly rank among the world’s most corrupt.
This casts a pall over the current zeal of state prosecutors and judges chasing after Shinawatra and Sundaravej, while nothing is done to bring the coupmakers, who hide behind a protective clause in the constitution, to book, or Limthongkul for his incitements to violence and illegal occupations of government buildings and public thoroughfares.
The cause of justice can make for strange bedfellows. Emotion and prejudice need to be set aside for the clarity of vision and purpose. The way there is not through the dubious and illegitimate methods of the reactionaries. Rather it requires patience and perseverance to nurture, warts and errors, democracy even if that means putting, temporarily, the distasteful in power.
Meanwhile the drama in Bangkok appears to be far from the final act. It may be years before the reactionaries and opportunists exhaust themselves in the face of the modernists skilled hands and the slowly growing power of the voters.
This article is available as PDF upon request.
|
