Former Army Commander-in-Chief General Sonthi Boonyaratglin, who led a military coup d’état in the first decade of the twenty-first century to topple the elected civilian government of former police officer and billionaire-tycoon-cum-politician Thaksin Shinawatra, said that his 2006 military intervention was necessary to fulfil the four obligations of the Thai armed forces. In his view, the Thai military has the duty to defend the country, to maintain domestic security, to help the government in times of crisis such as natural disasters, and—more importantly—to protect the monarchy.

In order to explain his coup, the retired general turned to events late in the last century, when a 1980 policy shift initiated by Prime Minister General Prem Tinsulanonda allowed the return of communist insurgents from the jungle and permitted national reconciliation. Communism has been considered a great threat to the Thai establishment since the middle of the twentieth century, given that its egalitarian idea challenges the very basis of a hierarchical regime, at the peak of which sits the monarchy.

“Among the ex-communist insurgents who returned to the legal fold to help develop Thailand, there are two groups: one agreed with democratic regime with the king as the head of state and the other one does not want the monarchy”, General Sonthi said in an interview.

Thai military intelligence believes that anti-monarchists have never given up on the ideology implanted in them when they were young and participated in guerrilla warfare with the Communist Party of Thailand (CPT), whose goal was undermining the revered institution, the retired general said. Many of them became academics, politicians and social activists working with non-governmental organizations and political parties. Among the most watched groups were those who joined with Thaksin Shinawatra to establish the Thai Rak Thai Party and won two elections, in 2001 and 2005. “In my personal view, Thaksin himself was not then a real threat to the monarchy since he was an ex-police officer and an alumnus of the Police Academy and Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School (AFAPS) who swore to protect the monarchy with his life. Like many other police and military officers, he was implanted with such an ideology when he was young.

Personalities

Anupong Paochinda:Born on 10 October 1949 in Bangkok, Anupong was the son of Prachao Paochinda, an Army colonel. He received his primary and secondary educations at Panthasueksa and Amnuay Silpa Schools in the capital before enrolling in the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School in 1967. He continued his military education at the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1972. He climbed the ladder in his military career while serving mostly in the 21st Infantry Regiment and the 2nd Infantry Division in Thailand’s eastern region before moving to the capital and serving as commander of the 1st Division (King’s Guard) starting in 2003 and of the 1st Army Region starting in 2005. Anupong played a crucial role in the September 2006 coup against Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and was rewarded with the post of Army chief in 2007. He became interior minister in the government of General Prayut Chan-ocha following the military coup of May 2014.

Apirat Kongsompong: Apirat was born on 23 March 1960 in Bangkok to General Sunthorn Kongsompong and Colonel Orachorn Kongsompong. He appears to have decided to follow in his parents’ footsteps and to become a soldier. He enrolled in the Armed Forces Academies Preparatory School after receiving his secondary education at Saint Gabriel’s College in the capital and graduated from the Chulachomklao Royal Military Academy in 1985. He also pursued a civilian education, earning a master’s degree in business administration from Southeastern University in Washington, DC. Apirat began his military career as a pilot at the Army Aviation Centre, a unit of which his father had previously served as commander. He undertook several training courses for pilots in the United States, including those at Fort Eustis, Virginia, and Fort Rucker, Alabama. He also attended the United States Army’s Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Gorgia. Apirat served as an assistant logistics officer in the office of Thailand’s defence attaché to Washington in the 1990s. He advanced during his military career mostly through service in the 1st Division (King’s Guard) in the capital. He also gained experience in counter-insurgency operations in the Deep South, when he served as deputy commander of the 11th Infantry Regiment before returning to the regiment as its commander.

Colonel Pitakpol Chusri, then the chief intelligence officer of a task force in the Northeastern Thai province of Khon Kaen, deemed it his duty to file a law suit against student activist Jatupat Boonpatararaksa from Khon Kaen University. For the officer saw that the student activist had shared an unflattering BBC Thai article carrying a personal profile of the newly enthroned King Vajiralongkorn.

Jatupat, better known as Pai Dao Din, was arrested on 3 December 2016. More than 2,600 people reportedly shared the same article when it appeared online on the occasion of the new king’s accession to the throne, but Jatupat was the only one prosecuted for lèse majesté. He was sentenced to two and a half years’ imprisonment under Article 112 of the Penal Code, but was freed after a royal pardon in May 2019—only forty-one days short of his prescribed jail term. He was among 50,000 persons granted royal pardons on the occasion of King Vajiralongkorn’s coronation. This total included six royalist Yellow Shirt leaders who had been jailed for occupying Government House during a 2008 protest—for the sake of monarchy, they claimed.

Wearing a yellow T-shirt symbolic of loyalty to the monarchy on the day he received his freedom, Jatupat spoke outside the prison in Khon Kaen Province in which he had been held. He said that he was grateful for the king’s kindness and his pardons to prisoners. But he insisted that he would continue fighting for human rights and democracy. Both the media and young activist himself observed that he had in fact been targeted since the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) junta took power in May 2014, both for his protests against the junta’s authority and for his campaign for rejection of the military-sponsored draft constitution. A military prosecutor filed charges against him and seven other activists in October 2016 for organizing a public forum at Khon Kaen University to discuss the draft charter. The prosecutor deemed the act a violation of the NCPO orders.

After he was freed in 2019, Jatupat had a chance to confront in person the military officer Pitakpol when the Law, Justice and Human Rights Committee of Thailand’s House of Representatives invited the two men to give testimony on 27 November 2019.

Unlike the late King Bhumibol, King Vajiralongkorn stays connected to the Thai armed forces through his own network, created after his succession to the throne in late 2016. Studies on the relationship between monarchy and military in Thailand, such as Duncan McCargo’s work on the “network monarchy” and Paul Chambers and Napisa Waitoolkiat’s article on the resilience of the “monarchized military” have suggested that the late king remained connected to the military through his network, at the centre of which was the late president of the Privy Council, General Prem Tinsulanonda. This network, which Chambers and Napisa regard as a “parallel state”, was “an asymmetrical nexus between a powerful monarch (King Bhumibol) and Privy Council and a military leadership”. As the chief adviser to the king, Prem used his relations with the monarchy as the source of the legitimacy needed for him to exercise influence over the military. He acted as a power broker who helped cement ties between the monarchy and the military during the last decades of the previous reign.

With such a relationship and the position of Privy Council president, Prem managed to secure a smooth royal transition during the critical period after King Bhumibol passed away in October 2016. The ageing Prem was appointed as regent pro tempore on 14 October 2016, a day after King Bhumibol’s passing, since the then crown prince—who was supposed to take the throne immediately after the death of his father, for the sake of continuity—said he wanted to take time to grieve with the nation before accepting the invitation to become Thailand’s new king. The crown prince realized that there could be some confusion or undesirable difficulties during such a critical period, and he therefore told the regent Prem and the junta chief and Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha during an audience that the two should help prevent public confusion over the administration and over the process of succession to the throne.

The crown prince noted that people should have no confusion over the administration or the succession to the throne since the latter process was clearly stated in the constitution and the Palace Law, according to Prayut.

The public image of Rama X of the Chakri Dynasty, who reigns as Phrabat Somdet Maha Vajiralongkorn Phravajiraklaochaoyuhua, has been projected as that of a career military man, a brave soldier and, later, a skilled jet fighter pilot. When King Vajiralongkorn ascended the throne on 1 December 2016, local media depicted the new sovereign as a military monarch, suggesting that the position he held under the constitution was not simply that of a ceremonial top commander but rather that of the “actual head of the Thai armed forces with resonances of the US President as Commander-in-Chief.”

On the occasion of the king’s birthday in 2019, the year of his formal coronation, Thailand’s sole national English-language newspaper, the Bangkok Post, presented the new monarch’s military profile in its headline, “Head of State with the Heart of Gold; His Majesty the King has an Illustrious Military Background”:

One of the king’s trusted warlords, Army Commander-in-Chief General Apirat Kongsompong emphasized during a high-profile public lecture on 11 October 2019 that the monarchy had led the military in wars and battles throughout the nation’s history to protect the kingdom. King Vajiralongkorn had, when he was the crown prince, fought shoulder to shoulder with brave soldiers on the battlefield, the general said.

“The monarchy, military and people are inseparable. In the past, the king was on an elephant, surrounded by soldiers. Not only soldiers but also the people, men and women who volunteered and sacrificed in battle alongside the king to protect the land of the Thais”, Apirat said during the rare public lecture. This speech explained the role of the monarchy and its asymmetrical relations with the military. While he did refer to the people, the general defined them as self-sacrificing, loyal subjects under the military, which played the role of protector in the hierarchical polity.

Monarchy and military have sat at the centre of Thai politics for a long time—since a king first created the armed forces to protect the crown and national interests at the beginning of the country’s modern history. The Thai military claims that it helps the monarchy fight for the survival of the nation; many historians and other scholars think otherwise. They have in innumerable works explained that the military in fact acts mostly to ensure its own survival and maintain its power and leading role in domestic politics, since Thailand has rarely faced external threats or wars. Two military coups in the first two decades of the twenty-first century have confirmed the fact that Thai politics is manipulated by the union of monarchy and military. These two institutions manipulated politics to ensure their own security and maintain the status quo of a hierarchical regime during the transition period before the ascension of a new sovereign to the throne.

As King Vajiralongkorn’s succession has been achieved smoothly under the military’s guardianship, exploring how the nexus of the crown and the armed forces will operate to maintain the status and roles of the two institutions is important. The new monarch, who took the throne after his father, King Bhumibol, passed away in late 2016, took many steps to secure his reign and ensure his own safety. Like many other kings in the past, King Vajiralongkorn badly needs to win over the men under arms, who present what is potentially the greatest danger to the new reign. There is no reason to expect that armed men will obey an unarmed one, or that an unarmed monarch will remain safe and secure when his servants are fully armed.

In this book I look into the relationship between, and interplay of, monarchy and military during the first five years of King Vajiralongkorn’s reign, but I have been able to see only some parts of the picture since this nexus is opaque. Not many people are willing to open their doors to discuss the matter openly and candidly—for fear of legal consequences as Thailand has draconian laws and regulations to prohibit free expression on matters relating to the royal institution.

The relationship between monarchy and military in Thailand has been asymmetrical since the beginning. When King Chulalongkorn’s reign gave birth to the modern Thai armed forces in the nineteenth century, their purpose was basically to serve the monarchy. That purpose was much more important than any role they had in national defence, given that fending off armed threats from the British and French empires was always going to be beyond the strength of Siamese forces. Also, the military was then under the command of the absolute monarchy. Thai soldiers took an oath not only to protect the monarchy but also to give loyalty to, to uplift, to glorify and to worship the monarchy as the pillar of the nation and the embodiment of the national spirit. Relations between the two institutions were essentially those of employer and servant, if not sometimes of master and slave. Sometimes in history, no doubt, servants want to have relations of equal partnership with their bosses.

Asymmetrical relations can, however, work to the advantage of both parties. With military protection, the monarchy survives and has the power to govern and to manipulate politics. The military in the meantime draws advantage from those relations in referring to the monarchy as its source of legitimacy as it too manoeuvres politically. This manoeuvring may benefit the military as an institution, one or more of its factions or cliques, or even individual officers. Further, those asymmetrical relations help ensure that the armed forces have no accountability to elected governments.

While the 1932 Revolution saw the monarchy being brought under the constitution, Thai charters—including the current one, sponsored by the military and promulgated in 2017—have positioned the king as the head of the armed forces. King Vajiralongkorn, who enacted the 2017 constitution, has made clear through his actions his intention to go beyond a merely ceremonial role to actually exercise the powers of that position and lead the Thai armed forces as their commander-in-chief.

To that end, the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO) junta under the leadership of General Prayut Chan-ocha introduced a number of legal instruments to authorize and justify the enhanced role of the monarchy in relation to the armed forces.

Introduction

Thailand’s modern cults of wealth emerge from diverse cultural, historical and religious origins, reflecting the deep history and the more recent intensification of the society’s polycultural complexity as detailed in the previous chapter. Each cult has a distinct history, has developed around a particular divine or magical figure, has its own forms of ritual expression and often also possesses its own shrines and sites of worship and pilgrimage. While having precedents in the religious valuing of prosperity in Thai Buddhism, all of the cults of wealth considered in this study are recent religious phenomena that only took their current forms in the later decades of the twentieth century. Four main categories of cults of wealth can be distinguished based on the type of deity or spiritual figure that is the focus of ritual devotion: cults of Thai kings and other royal personalities; cults of Chinese deities; cults of Hindu gods; and cults of magic monks, both living and dead, from Thailand’s Theravada tradition. In this chapter I describe the most prominent Thai cults of wealth in each of these four categories, pointing out their recentness, their differences from earlier Thai magical cults, their intimate associations with the market and their popularity among middle class and elite Thais. I begin by detailing older cults of prosperity that formed the religious setting from which new movements have emerged and diverged.

“Buddha Never Said Profit is a Dirty Word”: Precedents for the Modern Cults of Wealth

An emphasis on improving luck and acquiring wealth is not a wholly novel feature of vernacular Thai religiosity. The diverse cults of wealth represent a contemporary, commodified expression of long-standing patterns of Theravada devotionalism. Christine Gray emphasizes that there is “an elective affinity between Buddhism and capitalist expansion” (Gray 1986, p. 100) and that “Theravada Buddhism does not preclude a positive valuation of the pursuit of wealth, nor does it rule out a positive connection between the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of salvation” (p. 43). Rather, Gray observes,

Introduction

The Thai cults of wealth and associated cult of amulets, divination practices and spirit possession rituals have become increasingly important components of religious expression among many strata of Thai society. However, while a growing number of anthropological studies have explored these phenomena, few histories of modern Thailand have made magical ritual central to their narratives of the country’s transformations. This contrasts with the emphasis that has been given to the reform of Buddhism and the institutional role of the Buddhist sangha in modern Thailand (see for example Reynolds 1979, 1988; Somboon 1982; Ishii 1986; Jackson 1989). While the organizational changes of Buddhism instituted by a succession of governments from the beginning of the twentieth century are central elements of many histories of Thailand, the significant evolution of the field of ritual magic that has taken place across the same period is largely absent from narratives of the transformations of Thai society and culture wrought by modernity. Why has modern Thai historiography overlooked magical ritual while emphasizing Buddhism? Furthermore, if the cults of wealth, amulets, divination and spirit possession rituals are indeed central elements of contemporary Thai religiosity, why does the diversity of Thai religion continue to surprise many foreign observers and contrast with images of Thailand as an ostensibly Buddhist society? Why does the sociological importance of the cults of wealth appear to be so at odds with many academic accounts and popular representations of Thailand as a “Buddhist kingdom”?

These were issues in my own earlier work. As a post-doctoral researcher in the late 1980s, I studied the history of the political dimensions of Thai religion in the twentieth century. I looked at both the history of state administrative intervention in the organization of Buddhism and the role of military and other elite figures in the Hupphasawan millenarian movement of the spirit medium Suchat Kosonkittiwong. But I lacked a theoretical frame that would enable me to consider state interventions in Buddhism together with elite participation in magical rituals. While senior politicians and military figures participated in both state-administered Buddhism and spirit cults, I published my research separately, as a book on the incorporation of Thai Buddhism within the secular bureaucracy (Jackson 1989) and a stand-alone journal article on the Hupphasawan movement (Jackson 1988).