Rural Thais Find an Unaccustomed Power
Thai villagers, like these in Baan Nong Tun, describe a sort of democratic awakening in recent years and say they are no longer willing to accept a Bangkok-knows-best patriarchal system.
By THOMAS FULLER
Published: June 30, 2011
BAAN NONG TUN, THAILAND — Smiling farmers knee deep in emerald rice paddies and shirtless children riding on the backs of mud-caked water buffalo — these are the romantic images of the Thai countryside. There is one problem with it, says Udom Thapsuri, a farmer here and a local sage. It does not exist anymore.
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Election in Thailand (July 1, 2011)
Agnes Dherbeys for the International Herald Tribune
"Young people can't plant," said Nirand Nammontri, the owner of a rural grocery store. "They say it hurts their backs."
Agnes Dherbeys for the International Herald Tribune
Kayun Thapthani, who won a seat on the first council in Baan Nong Tun, has watched as villagers gained sense that they could control their own political destiny.
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"No one walks to their farm with a big bamboo hat on. That's over," said Mr. Udom, 63, sitting next to his pickup truck.
As campaigning for the national election Sunday entered its final days, there was broad consensus that rural votes would be crucial in deciding the outcome. But no one is quite sure what rural means anymore.
Villagers here complain of slow Internet download speeds. On a single street that winds past rice paddies, residents tell of work stints in Taiwan, Singapore, Israel and Saudi Arabia, enough frequent-flier miles to rival the inhabitants of a tony Bangkok condominium.
Once passive and fatalistic, villagers are now better educated, more mobile, less deferential and ultimately more politically demanding.
Researchers who study rural life say villages like Baan Nong Tun may be ground zero for understanding why Thailand's political crisis — warring political factions, five years of street protests and violent military crackdowns — has been so intractable. The old social contract, whereby power flowed from Bangkok and the political establishment could count on quiet acquiescence in the Thai countryside, has broken down.
Villagers describe a sort of democratic awakening in recent years and say they are no longer willing to accept a Bangkok-knows-best patriarchal system. It is an upheaval that has been ill-understood by the elites, said Attachak Sattayanurak, a history professor at Chiang Mai University, in northern Thailand.
"The old establishment and the Thai state have a picture of an agrarian society frozen in time," he commented on a television program that aired in June. "They maintain a picture of local people as well-behaved and obedient, which in fact they aren't. Peasant society doesn't exist anymore.
"If the country's leaders do not understand these changes, they will not be able to solve our problems," Mr. Attachak said.
Charles Keyes, a U.S. academic who first studied village life here nearly five decades ago, describes a transformation from "peasants to cosmopolitan villagers."
"There is a sense in Thai society that the social contract is being renegotiated," said Mr. Keyes, a professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Washington.
The convulsive changes to village life and the breakdown of a national political consensus are not just relevant to Thailand, but are a cautionary tale for other countries in Asia that are developing so rapidly, Mr. Keyes says.
"It's definitely something the Chinese, for one, should be more aware of," he said.
For most of Thailand's tumultuous modern history of military coups and countless constitutions, democracy trickled into this rice-farming village. Villagers felt far removed from national elections and rarely met the members of Parliament they voted for.
Then, in the 1990s, as part of an effort to decentralize power, the government introduced a system of local councils, known as township administrative organizations.
Kayun Thapthani, who won a seat on the first council in Baan Nong Tun, remembers a timid gathering of farmers in a meeting hall next to the Buddhist temple. Villagers listened quietly and politely to proposals for road building and support for the elderly. But as time wore on, and when budgets rose and meetings dealt with controversial projects, the deference dissipated. Mr. Kayun described rowdy sessions when "everything became messy, everything went mad."
The councils gave villagers a sense that they could control their own political destiny, said Mr. Udom, the village wise man. The system has come with its disappointments — council budgets are strained and have shrunk in recent years — but the system has brought a greater sense of political intimacy than elections for the national Parliament in Bangkok, a seven-hour drive away. "We have a lot more expectations," Mr. Udom said.
Those expectations were partly answered after the election a decade ago of the populist prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, whose power base was in rural areas, especially here in northeastern Thailand. Mr. Thaksin, a billionaire tycoon and thus a seemingly unlikely champion of the peasant class, managed to cement his popularity by introducing universal health care and funneling government funds into villages, where local officials decided how to distribute it.
When Mr. Thaksin's party was re-elected in 2005 by a wide margin, Mr. Keyes, the professor, remembers a villager's elation. "It used to be that the elite decided who was in power," Mr. Keyes remembers the villager saying. "Today we decide."
But Mr. Thaksin's concentration of power — his critics would say his abuse of power — alienated many voters, especially the elite. Mr. Thaksin faced large-scale street demonstrations in Bangkok against his rule and was overthrown in a military coup in 2006, polarizing the country. Two subsequent prime ministers, allies of Mr. Thaksin's, were also removed from office by the courts in highly politicized cases that many Thaksin supporters say reflected the wishes of the elite.
Mr. Thaksin's allies are trying once again to win power in the election Sunday with the tycoon's sister, Yingluck Shinawatra, as the candidate for prime minister. Ms. Yingluck, who is leading in the polls, is up against the party of Abhisit Vejjajiva, the current prime minister, who is allied with the military leadership and the Bangkok establishment.
Thailand's divisions are often described as rural versus urban and rich versus poor, but William Klausner, another U.S. academic, who has studied Thai rural life for more than five decades, says that is an oversimplification. The salient changes to rural life, he says, are that villagers have been unbridled by the dismantling of traditional hierarchies, have broadened their ambitions and are emboldened to speak their minds. In recent years, busloads of villagers have traveled to Bangkok to protest — for and against Mr. Thaksin.
More than two-thirds of Thailand's population lives in rural areas, according to government statistics. But migrations in recent decades have blurred the distinction between countryside and city.
Every family has someone who has gone to work in Bangkok or abroad, says Nirand Nammontri, the owner of a grocery store in Baan Nong Tun who built her house with money that her husband made working at a printing factory in Taiwan.
Although her home is a stone's throw from rice fields, her lifestyle is only marginally bucolic. Her family sometimes raises chickens, but her husband, who now drives a pickup truck modified to serve as a school bus, hires someone to slaughter them. "He feels very sorry for the chickens," Ms. Nirand said.
Her 21-year-old son, who is studying to become a computer programmer, does not know how to plant or harvest rice. "Young people can't plant," Ms. Nirand said. "They say it hurts their backs."
Technology has brought great changes to many parts of the world in recent decades, but the pace of change has been particularly breathless in the Thai countryside.
Five decades ago, Mr. Keyes and Mr. Klausner, now a senior fellow at the Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok, separately witnessed isolated, self-sufficient villages where farmers grew their own food and rarely used money because they counted on their neighbors to help with farm work or build stilt houses out of local timber. There was no electricity, piped water or telephone service.
Villagers rarely challenged their superiors, believed in the wrath of the supernatural and had a strong sense of right and wrong that was buttressed by a reverence for local Buddhist monks.
Today, Baan Nong Tun is plugged into the rest of Thailand by television, radio and the Internet. Traveling to other provinces is routine, and every family has a motorcycle or pickup truck.
Mr. Udom squeezes his eyes shut when asked about the changes.
Villagers are more individualistic, and no one works for free, he said. Young people routinely go to college, and families also have more debt. "People want to buy things they cannot afford," he said.
There is less shame. "People don't believe in sin and virtue anymore," Mr. Udom said, his eyes still shut.
The generation gap — from peasant to cosmopolitan villager — is evident in villagers' hands. Mr. Udom's calloused fingers are swollen by years of farm work. Younger people have the soft, thin fingers of city dwellers.
Even the buffaloes have changed their comportment, Mr. Udom said. They used to put in long workdays, hauling and plowing, tasks now done by machines. The buffaloes of today are more disobedient, lazy and fat. And children in the village, who watch television or congregate at Internet cafes when they are not at school, no longer ride on buffaloes' backs, Mr. Udom said.
"I haven't seen that in a long time," he said.
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