along a stone path on the edge of a large clearing, sparsely shaded by trees, that was surrounded by low, mostly single-story buildings occupied by the inmates. Many inmates chatted in groups in or on the edges of the clearing. We entered one of the bungalows, which was packed tight with inmates (mostly young men) sitting on the concrete floor. Besides the lawyers and Madawi, the translator, the warden, and several officers, there were forty-nine inmates, of whom forty-three were Burmese. There was a small space at the front of the room with a microphone and an easel with large sheets of foolscap. Phiphat took the microphone and introduced the lawyers, telling the inmates that the lawyers were there to explain their rights under Thai law and to answer any questions they might have.
Chokchai, a prominent lawyer who had joined the group for this project, spoke first, briefly explaining that the constitution guaranteed certain rights to all of them, regardless of their nationality. Making conspicuous use of the language of human rights, he said, “You are human, and so you have rights. The police must explain them clearly and offer translation.” He emphasized the problem of acting under conditions of lack of understanding, like signing forms the police present to them when they are unsure if they must sign or what the forms mean. Chokchai continued, saying that they may be held a maximum of two days without charge and are entitled to lawyers who speak their language. In response, a Burmese man stood to ask whether, when a man is arrested, the police can then go and arrest his wife and children. At this point, Madawi leaned to me and said, “Some people stay in here for years but do not know they have rights … do not know their own rights.” In part, she blamed this on the Burmese government, as it was very sensitive on the subject of labor migration and on human trafficking in particular. It was, therefore, unsupportive of Burmese imprisoned in Thailand and uninterested in pursuing or even informing them of their rights.
After Pinyo’s brief presentation on HIV/AIDS prevention, the inmates, who had remained attentive but said little, filed out, and the rest of us went to have lunch with the officers and the warden. After ensuring that Phiphat, the warden, was sitting between Alip and Chokchai (the senior lawyers), the rest of us took our seats and engaged in small talk over our meal. An atmosphere that could easily have been testy—human rights lawyers sitting with prison officers—was light and congenial, underlining the spirit of cooperation among the lawyers and officers. This seemed to epitomize the model of human rights protection that Dr. Chuchai had described, but there is an ethics underlying it that reflects, implicitly, Buddhadasa’s teachings. That is, this approach seems to wish for circumstances that facilitate Burmese migrants’ movement toward nibbana but more directly guides agents of the state away from demeritorious acts—human rights abuses—by acting in the world. The ethical model, then, is not the renunciate monk but an engaged Buddhist who promotes social welfare.
These examples, echoing Dr. Chuchai, Saneh, and Khunying Amphorn, show how Buddhism and human rights lent one another force. As an ordinary event in Thai political and social history, human rights’ emergent character imbued them with an indeterminacy that resisted reduction to a settled body of principles and practices. Receiving them as if overheard, Thai human rights advocates were then able at this moment to conceive of human rights through egalitarian views of Buddhism, finding their voices in human rights by way of everyday moral understandings. Buddhism allowed human rights an especially potent anchorage in Thai morality, but securing the moral and cultural salience of human rights in this way has allowed experimentation in the politics of Thai Buddhism. Human rights here did not transcend the Buddhist morality that supported authoritarian rule and social stratification but became a way of turning that morality and reoccupying its moral space. Taking the ordinary as the ground of events (Dumm 1999, 21–23), human rights partake of the eventedness of the everyday in that, inviting a turn within Thai morality to an egalitarian vision of Buddhism, they allow an alternative not as revolution but transfiguration, the ordinary invaded by another ordinary (Mulhall 1994, 166; Cavell 1989, 44). To be sure, human rights discourses can appear as language on holiday, disconnected from ordinary life (Das 2007, 6). What I have tried to show, however, is how finding human rights a home in everyday ethics—a struggle within the everyday for persuasiveness—in fact opened Buddhist morality to experimentation, to transfiguration, to new opportunities for the discovery or recovery of an ethical voice.
Chapter 2
Political Struggle and Human Rights
The previous chapter argued that the way that human rights advocates articulated human rights with Buddhism allowed for experimentation simultaneously with religion and with the political. In this chapter, I show that the political vision of human rights agents like the NHRC does not end with arguments for an egalitarian Buddhism but also seeks to legitimate itself through the inheritance and recuperation of a particular political history, the history of democratic struggle. Such claims are sometimes overt and sometimes implicit, and my argument here is that laying claim to the history of democratic struggle involves promoting a certain way of remembering and memorializing moments of democratic struggle that have been subject to projects of collective forgetting. Just what should count as part of Thailand’s history of democratic struggle has been a matter of contest for two generations, especially over the status of the 1976 student uprising mentioned in the previous chapter. This chapter explores how the NHRC envisions itself as an inheritor of the radical democratic movements in Thailand’s past and in part how it sees human rights in Thailand as a product of those movements and the sentiments that motivated them. To support this argument, I review three critical moments of prodemocracy uprising (in 1973, 1976, and 1992) that preceded the NHRC and discuss the potency of specific political symbols deployed during the uprisings. The NHRC, in what amounts to a declaration of its identity, its foundational strategic plan, recasts these symbols—and, indeed, makes symbols of the demonstrations themselves—to position the NHRC within the heritage of democratic struggles. Just as the articulation of human rights in and with Buddhism transfigured each, as I explored in the first chapter, the recuperation I describe here of Thailand’s radical democratic past as the soil from which human rights have grown gives them a specific hue and cast. Finally, this chapter shows that there is not a single vision of human rights or their advocacy, despite this egalitarian, democratic bent in the NHRC, but that there are plural, sometimes competing visions. The NHRC is then not just a site for defining and promoting human rights but also of contest over their scope and practices.
On my first visit to the ONHRC (the secretariat that supports NHRC commissioners), Kat, a lawyer working there, drew my attention to this contest. Having seated me across from her at her desk, one of the fifteen or so cubicles squeezed into the ground-floor office on Phayathai Road that made up the ONHRC, she asked her assistant to bring us glasses of Nescafé. While we sipped them, she explained that the lynchpin of human rights in Thai society is Buddhism. The refrain is now familiar: the problem is to encourage equality (ส่งเสริมเสมอภาค), but inequality is sustained by the idea that the wealthy have more merit.1 Immediately after this, she said that it was a problem of establishing a new hegemony2 (she used the English term here), an effort that began with the 6 October 1976 uprising and continued in May 1992 but was not yet complete.3 The 1997 constitution (created after the restoration of democracy following the 1992 uprising), she continued, secured the right to equality and was the most progressive constitution Thailand had produced. While Kat emphasized that the effort to settle the problem of equality is not contrary to Buddhism or Thai society,4 here I emphasize the line connecting events from the 6 October 1976 demonstrations through the May 1992 democracy uprising to the 1997 constitution. To that end, I will review the history of democratic struggle that began in the 1970s; how the rise and implosion of the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT) led to a wide-ranging and widespread NGO movement; the ways in which the channeling of many former leftist students, sometimes via NGOs, into the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH) has led to a divergence in human rights methodologies; and how the NHRC, in laying claim to a particular vision of Thailand’s democratic history, struggles to employ, promote, and legitimate the form of egalitarianism that Kat
