Although historically and geographically diverse, but sharing religious cultural roots, contemporary Sri Lanka and Thailand are both characterised by authoritarianism. This parallel cannot be explained as simply due to both countries being Theravāda polities. Nevertheless, dominant politics in both countries express elements of conservative ethno-Buddhism, within the cultural markers of national identity and contested political discourse. The political economy of political Buddhism in both countries can best be apprehended as genealogical problems in the context of an emergent new space, which heralds the inexorable logic of the future foretold: new hegemonic, populist/ultra-nationalist forms of governance, influenced by Chinese capital investment.

The Thai and Burmese generals are cooperating to ensure democracy and liberty are crushed in both countries. This unholy alliance goes back to the days when current General Min Aung Hlaing, chair of Myanmar’s ruling junta, regarded Thailand’s ultra-royalist now-deceased undemocratic General Prem Tinsulanonda as his adopted father and inspiration. Prem, as Chief Privy Councillor, was always close to the Thai palace and the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej. Their combined strategy was to use the military to restrict freedom and human rights, while appearing democratic.  Military coups, along with violence, have been repeatedly carried out. Thailand has had some thirty coup attempts since 1912. Nicholas Farrelly notes, “Thailand’s 19 modern military coups and attempted coups distinguish its elite political culture from those of other so-called ‘coup-prone’ states. Since a bloodless military coup in 1932 [apparently] ended Thailand’s absolute monarchy, Thailand has failed to consolidate a democratic culture among its elites that would make coups inconceivable. Instead, episodic military interventionism – supported by persistent military influence in politics – is now part of a distinctive Thai coup culture that has been reproduced over many decades.” The 1932 military coup to overthrow the absolute monarchy never actually obliterated monarchical absolutism; it only masked the autocratic authority held by the military-monarchy alliance (Taylor 2021) behind limited parliamentary democracy (with senators handpicked and political leaders sanctioned by the palace). The current situation in Thailand can be referred to as “neo-absolutism” (Streckfuss 2014). This arrangement has endured under a façade of democracy maintained by mass propaganda and military control over the judiciary, apparatuses of state, and commerce. 

In Sri Lanka, certain coup dynamics are not discernible given that the Rajapaksas and the armed forces are at one. Tellingly, Sri Lanka’s British-inspired constitutional traditions show an ability to withstand and counter the worst excesses of Sinhalese authoritarianism. But the militarisation of both the civil administration and public life continues. The consequence is the on-going strangulation of civic space, a dynamic we also discern in Thailand.  

In the pre-European and colonial history of Sri Lanka and Thailand, there were Buddhist missions between Kandy and Siam. Indeed, the Kandyan Sangha was repurified by a mission that saw the Thai monk Upali Thera carry out upasampada for a small group of Sinhalese monks. So came into being the Siyam Nikaya in Kandy. Other missions followed. But from the late nineteenth century urban Theravāda Buddhism in both Sri Lanka and Thailand underwent modernisation and a concomitant fashioning of a thoroughly individualist ethic wholly consistent with the logic of capital. The ideological conservatism that characterises the urban Sangha in both Sri Lanka and Thailand is thus a consequence of this modernisation, or what Gombrich and Obeyesekere (1988) characterised as “Protestantisation.”

Here we look at the varied consequences of Buddhist modernism in Sri Lanka and Thailand in two shared registers: First, marginalisation, ethno-chauvinism, and ethnic palingenetic ultranationalism (Roger Griffin’s term) with its re-interpretations of a conservative Buddhist ideology; and, second, an alliance between political elites (i.e. Sinhalese senior public servants, military leaders, and a Sinhalese political class, and, in Thailand, a monarchical regime with serving officer corps) and a Westernised bourgeoisie, which sustains an ethno-historical prism of nationalism, hierarchy and order. The more recent intervention of Chinese capital has impacted these domestic social, political, and economic arrangements, while creating neo-colonial regional dependencies.

When the Burmese Generals launched a coup in February 2021 there was speculation in Sri Lanka the Sinhalese leadership of the Sri Lankan armed forces would do something similar. The objective would have been to ostensibly bolster the Rajapaksas cultural-constitutional state project – one inspired by the Chinese Communist Party’s mediation of Han culture. Influenced by Beijing, the Rajapaksas and the new Sinhalese elites have rejected the constitutional frame of the nation-state (originating in the colonial-bureaucratic reforms of the 1830s) in favour of that of the civilisation-state. This is reflected in a desire to align the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist history. The Burmese generals have pursued a similar strategy. That said, Sri Lanka, for all its ethno-religious extremism, has maintained the outward form of constitutional government. Myanmar, by contrast, left the Commonwealth after independence and, following the military coup of 1962, General Ne Win declared that parliamentary democracy was alien to Myanmar’s Buddhist history (Aung-Thwin and Aung-Thwin 2013, 27). The Myanmar military, like much of Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese nationalist elites, simply misrepresented its own past. However, what these countries share is a process of either voluntary or enforced Sinification, which will have disastrous consequences for the region. This will lead to consequences such as an increased debt burden with China, the destruction of home-grown industries, and the assault on both individuals and civil society who oppose Beijing’s clients.    

Modalities of violence in the periphery

The Rajapaksas came to power in 2019-20 with one stated objective: to restore good governance (in light of the shambles of the previous Sirisena/Wickremesinghe government). In this context, “good government” aligned with an ethno-nationalist ideology. The Rajapaksas came to power promising security for the majority Buddhist community, even if that entailed increased insecurity for non-Sinhalese communities, particularly in the minority-dominated hinterland. Indeed, the minor reforms of the Sirisena/Wickremesinghe period, such as reducing militarisation in the northeast, were swiftly reversed. Since coming to power, the Rajapaksas have spent much energy focusing on the margins of the nation-state, specifically the hinterland of the northeast where ethno-religious minorities are the majority.

Margins are defined as sites far from the centres of state sovereignty in which states have weak jurisdiction and political control and are unable to ensure implementation of their programmes and policies. To the extent that both the Sri Lankan and Thai states have sought to exercise control over their political and geographical margin, their respective practices have been over-determined. By this we mean that the state’s response to contradictory/antagonistic forces is reduced to a singularity – the monopoly of state violence. That is to say, violence that is both structural and “symbolic” (Žižek 2008) is necessary to mask the contradictions emanating from the margins and the multiplicity of meanings that the margins generate. Rather than confront the contradictions of the multi-ethnic/religious peripheries imaginatively, the state resorts to the singularity of structural violence.

In Thailand, the state’s periphery is defined along ethno-religious terms and in terms of the form that Buddhism and Buddhist practice takes, especially in the far north and northeast where charismatic monks have dominated public religious life since the nineteenth century. The political economy of space shows how the centre and periphery are contested domains of power. The Thai (and previously Siamese) state since the early twentieth century has, for example, pursued a policy of cultural assimilation directed at the ethnic Lao of northeast Thailand and the ethnic northern Thai (Khon Mueang) – a classic instance of symbolic violence. This echoes processes in Sri Lanka’s northeast borderlands that led those with hybrid ethno-religious sensibilities to increasingly identify as Sinhalese Buddhists. Such is the legacy of urban Protestant Buddhism and its ossifying logic with respect to identity, as H.L Seneviratne (1999, pp 105-120) documents in his monumental work on the processes of rationalisation in Sinhalese Buddhism initiated by the Theosophists in late nineteenth century Ceylon.

Religious nationalism and ethno-culturalism

In Seneviratne’s trenchant critique, the modernising turn in Ceylon associated with Dharmapala led to a form of political Buddhism that was culturally monistic; the Rajapaksas, the Sinhalese bureaucracy, and the military are merely completing the policy agenda of political Buddhism initially framed by the Vidyalankara in the first half of the twentieth century. Like all nationalist projects it will succeed and fail simultaneously; the more it succeeds, the more it will fail, for it will have to continually reinvent it’s other. Contemporary Sinhalese nationalism since the demise of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) shows flexibility in selecting its target – Muslims and Tamils, but also liberal-left Sinhalese, women’s rights activists, and wider civil society. Given this intimidating scenario, an exodus of educated middle-class Sri Lankans is likely (note the proliferation of private English tuition on the island simply for the purpose of aiding migration overseas).

In the meantime, the Rajapaksas are putting their wider mission into practice, focusing on transforming what remains of the resistant margins of the island’s northeast. The Covid-19 pandemic has amplified the institutional weaknesses of the Sinhalese state, allowing for the renewal of Sinhalese nationalism and other forms of populism, although a resurgent Tamil populism remains elusive at this time. Wang observed in April 2021 that Covid-19 “had underscored how fragmented Sri Lanka’s domestic supply chains were, leading to inefficiencies throughout the logistics sector.” The impact was devastating on farmers trying to get their produce to markets and urban centres. However, in one domain the logistics of the state are very effective: the intensification of the Sinhalese state’s commitment to fashioning a homogenous vision of Sinhalese Buddhist cultural forms. N.Q. Dias in the 1960s first envisioned a policy designed to physically encompass the Tamils in the Jaffna peninsula, the Vannī, and the east. His plan initially was to be executed by the then Jaffna Government Agent (GA), the late Neville Jayaweera, whose task was to enforce the Official Language Act in Jaffna and assist Dias in developing a series of measures for dealing with an anticipated Tamil uprising against the impact of a discriminatory policy agenda pursued by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party. To contain this future Tamil revolt, Dias staked his nationalist credentials by unfolding a plan to construct army camps encircling the Northern Prov­ince.  

Jumping forward to 2021, the Rajapaksas are Dias reincarnated. In the Eastern Province the Rajapaksa brothers (President Gothabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa) have set about the task of completing the homogenization of the east in a Sinhalese Buddhist image. Ironically, homogenization is what the LTTE sought in the east when they were in the ascendency; more recently, Wahabi influenced Muslims in the east have exhibited similar objectives. The Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who have organized around the Rajapaksas may well succeed. To the task of making the dhammadīpa whole in the Sinhalese nationalist imaginary, the new President appointed an all-male and all Sinhalese Buddhist Presidential Task Force for Archaeological Heritage Management in the Eastern Province. The task force’s objective is to “build a Secure Country, Disciplined, Virtuous and Lawful society” (Groundviews 2021). It is hard to imagine how a body that is only comprised of retired and serving senior military and police chiefs could achieve this, other than in the most specious way imaginable – one that serves to further the Sinhalese nationalist dream of wholesale spatial reorganisation in the east (in which the Tamils and Muslims are reduced to permanent second-class status) in the name of a highly fetishized Buddhism. The secondary purpose of this mission is to embed the long-term dominance of the Rajapaksas, their kin networks, and their allies in the capitalist class and the military.

Thailand protests and the monarchy issue

In Thailand, protests against the monarchy-military alliance continue. Many observers thought the student-led protests and international support would bring the authoritarian leadership in Thailand to its knees and the monarch to the negotiating table. In this, they were mistaken. The response has instead been increased repression. The current student-led protests (with an increasingly broad social base) have a genealogy that stretches back to the red shirt protests of 2009-2010. Many of these students were too young to know the violence and injustices committed on protestors in 2010 but seem well informed through alternative free media and their well-informed seniors. Ironically, during the 2010 violence against protestors, the international and domestic media were reluctant to talk about the legitimacy of red shirt claims, or to expose the atrocities committed by ultra-royalists and the military on the streets in Bangkok. The persecution since that time has not stopped. Ann Norman of the Thai Alliance for Human Rights has compiled reports of the state sanctioned assassination of red shirt democracy activists and the plight of those individuals forced to flee to neighbouring countries since the 2010 crackdown. In contrast, we have seen in the past year live coverage of student-led protests beamed across the world in real time and witnessed increasing police brutality – especially a violent militarised faction trained under the auspices of the king, known as Ratchawallop Police Retainers, King’s Guards 904.

The student-led protestors have made three demands of the ruling regime: sack the junta’s self-appointed Prime Minister, Prayut Chan-Ocha; establish a new democratic constitution; and reform the monarchy into a more accountable and transparent institution under the constitution. The fear at present is the increasing evidence of monarchical absolutism under the current king. The latter demand does not imply “toppling” the monarchy (lom-jao), though semantics make little difference to die-hard ultra-royalists concerned that democratic reforms would weaken their patronage networks. Meanwhile, the junta has been using propaganda to encourage fascistic followers wearing yellow shirts to take to the streets. This rise of the New Right is seen not only in Thailand, but also in Sri Lanka, India, and elsewhere (Taylor 2021; Bello 2019). In Thailand, these developments are dangerous as we have seen in the past when pro-democracy groups took their grievances to the streets, only to have agents provocateurs and reactionaries mobilised to generate violence. This is the endgame in an authoritarian state-sanctioned ruse.  

The transmission of knowledge these days is largely through social media and social networking or messaging apps. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued statements on the regime’s attempt to shut down conventional media broadcasting, other than the royalist-military media (i.e, the Manager [Phuujadkaan], Daily News, Bangkok Post and the Nation). But international NGOs have little influence in Thailand.  

If the regime does not listen to the people, who does it listen to, other than the mostly Bavarian-resident monarch? Publicly, the Royal Household in Bangkok has maintained that the King’s public appearances during the year were cancelled owing to the third wave of Covid-19, which Thailand has not yet (at the time of writing) managed to get under control. As in Sri Lanka, the pandemic has become a cover for further curtailing civil liberties and targeting those engaged in democratic participation. 

Regarding Thailand’s Covid-19 vaccine roll out, for the first year of the pandemic this was nothing short of a farce – the privileged pharmaceutical facility owned by the Thai king, Siam Bioscience, was supposed to manufacture the Astra Zeneca vaccine, but this proved to be a flop. As well, the country is now heavily dependent on China’s Sinovac/Sinopharm (not internationally peer-reviewed and showing low effectiveness), produced under a lucrative contract between a royalist-favoured company owned by the Charoen Pokphand Group (CP) and the Chinese Government. Officially, 36% of the Thai population have been fully vaccinated, though this could be an overstatement. Meanwhile, those people who want a credible vaccine (where supplies are available) must buy their own.

Thailand’s shifting political economy mirrors developments in other Theravāda Buddhist majority states. Myanmar and Sri Lanka are exemplary of military-corporate states that have become heavily indebted (both financially and politically) to the Chinese state. The military in Thailand could also use a Covid-19 resurgence to further embed the dominant role of Beijing and mainland Chinese commercial interests in the Thai state, especially given that only Beijing has the financial capacity to distribute development largesse. The latter is a real possibility in Sri Lanka as Covid-19 community transmission increases and the most likely means to counter such resurgence is China’s vast currency reserves, the Sinopharm vaccine, and the patron-client dynamics emerging between dominant elements of Sinhalese capital in Sri Lanka and the corporate Chinese state. The corporate-military-royalist Thai state ought to see the dangers of lopsided development, trade, and commercial relations if they continue to cede economic sovereignty to China.

Political Buddhism and a third space

In Thailand, the country’s propaganda machinery has been at full steam to create further divisions in society, mocking the student-led protests as anti-monarchy and anti-statist. This could lead to violence, making military intervention appear necessary and justified, leading to another coup. In the sense of Henri Lefebvre’s “politics of space”, the royalist Thai state and its compliant capitalists and public sector servants are directed to ‘‘pulverise’’ democratic space into a manageable, calculable, and abstract grid and prevent diverse social forces from creating, defending, or extending contested spaces of social reproduction and autonomy.

In Sri Lanka, the struggle over the constitutional anchoring/grounding of space has been reclaimed by Sinhalese Buddhist ethno-nationalists who in President Gotabaya Rajapaksa have found a willing ally in the task of fashioning a Chinese inspired “civilisation state” (see Collins and O’Brien 2019, pp 36-49), a state model which aligns the future evolution of the Sri Lankan state with a modernist reading of pre-colonial Sinhalese Buddhist historiography. Similarly, Thailand also has groups that have coalesced under the umbrella of the “Buddhism Protection Centre of Thailand” (sun phitak phraphuttasasana haeng prathet thai), advocating for a relatively ossified form of Thai Buddhist state, which intertwines the cultural identity of the Thai-Buddhist community with the identity of the Thai state (see Katewadee Kulabkaew 2019).

In Thailand, we may see the creation of a radical “third space” (Soja 1996) as a consequence of the 2020-2021 student-led protests. In following Soja’s reading of Lefebvre, the “third space” is defined as “an-Other way of understanding and acting to change the spatiality of human life, a distinct mode of critical spatial awareness that is appropriate to the new scope and significance being brought about in the rebalanced trialectics of spatiality–historicality–sociality” (ibid. p.57). This has involved some radical Buddhist monks, though not many compared to revolutionary Myanmar, as the Thai Sangha is highly regulated at all levels by monastic and lay conservatives and centre-state elites under the monarchy. There is little autonomy for Thailand’s Supreme Sangha Council as directives now come directly down from the king. If a radical “third space” opens up in Thailand it will be a turning point from a “feudal-like” (sakdina) (see Reynolds 2018, pp 149-170) social order towards greater democracy. Sri Lankan progressives can only dream of a future in which a civil-society-generated “third space” may emerge and re-energise the task of re-territorialising the ethno-Sinhalese state in an authentically pluralist direction.

As Thai society and culture changes, the need for a new democratic constitution  to replace the current 2017 military-drafted constitution, has become an imperative. The 2017 constitution is a partisan “cultural constitution” that allows for the capture of (absolute) state power by a monarchy-military (“deep state”) alliance. Its logic and structure are being emulated by Sinhalese Buddhist nationalists in Sri Lanka as President Rajapakse harnesses a modernist reconstruction of Buddhist historiography to fashion himself as a monarchical president channelling the energy of an absolutist and righteous (dhammiko rajadhamma) cakkavatti.

In Thailand’s militarised constitution, the “juristocracy” (Mérieau 2014) prospers on misuses and abuses of what is termed “judicial review”. A constitution is supposedly a mechanism for the organisation, distribution, and regulation of power. However, as a foundational law of the state, a constitution’s origins are always extra-legal, and yet it simultaneously constructs a normative framework for the organisation of the state and its institutions. Thailand’s 2017 constitution is so flawed that it should never have been validated by the Constitutional Court of Thailand (Khemthong Tonsakulrungruang 2017). In a democratic society, given broad social and cultural changes, a constitution will always need constant revisions at historical periods to reflect the concerns and cultural values of its citizens, as constitutional legitimacy depends on its cultural anchoring. But it ought not to be anchored in a highly fetishized conservative-elite Buddhist historiography. This historiography needs to be opened up to new possibilities that render it imaginable to think anew about the nature of the social and the political in Thailand and Sri Lanka. In both countries, but in Thailand in particular, it appears that the ruling political regimes and their state apparatuses hear, given the volume of the protests, but do not listen (Thai: phuak’khao dai’yin tae phuak khao mai-fang).

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Roshan de Silva-Wijeyeratne is Senior Lecturer in Law at Liverpool Hope University.

James Taylor is Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Adelaide, South Australia and affiliate at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Chiang Mai University. 

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References

Aung-Thwin, Michael and Maitrii Aung-Thwin. 2013, A History of Myanmar since Ancient Times: Traditions and Transformations, second edition. London: Reaktion Books.

Bello, Walden. 2019. Counter-Revolution: The global rise of the far right. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.

Collins, Neil and David O’Brien. 2019. The politics of everyday China Guidance for the Uninitiated. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Gombrich, Richard and Gananath Obeyesekere. 1988. Buddhism Transformed: Religious Change in Sri Lanka. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Groundviews. 2021. “Shaping a Single Narrative, courtesy the Clergy and Task Forces,” 11 July. https://groundviews.org/2021/11/07/shaping-a-single-narrative-courtesy-the-clergy-and-task-forces/

Reynolds, Craig. 2018. “Feudalism in The Thai Past,” in Thai Radical Discourse: The Real Face of Thai Feudalism Today. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Streckfuss, David. 2014. “Freedom and Silencing under the Neo-Absolutist Monarchy Regime in Thailand, 2006–2011,” in Pavin Chachavalpongpun ed., Good Coup Gone Bad: Thailand’s Political Development since Thaksin’s Downfall. Singapore: ISEAS.

Seneviratne, H L. 1999. The Work of Kings: The New Buddhism in Sri Lanka. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Taylor, Jim. 2021. “Thailand’s new right, social cleansing and the continuing military-monarchy entente.” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics 6(3): 253-273.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

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Cite as: de Silva-Wijeyeratne, Roshan and James Taylor. 2021. “State and crisis in Sri Lanka and Thailand: Hearing but not listening in the Theravāda Buddhist world.” FocaalBlog, 20 December. https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/20/roshan-de-silva-wijeyeratne-and-james-taylor-state-and-crisis-in-sri-lanka-and-thailand-hearing-but-not-listening-in-the-theravada-buddhist-world/