the discussion of Buddhism at the NHRC, I raised overhearing as an aspect of how human rights have emerged in Thailand. A way that “overhearing” may elucidate the emergence of human rights is how it suggests catching a fragment of conversation, possibly addressed elsewhere, that holds interest or implications for oneself, while leaving one to do the work of finding one’s way about with respect to the overheard. A human rights activist and professor at the Office of Human Rights Studies and Social Development at Mahidol University told me a story of her political activism with the nascent Democracy Campaign Program when she was in high school that demonstrates this aspect of overhearing. In the early 1970s, she was inspired to join a movement pushing for increased freedoms and democracy. She went to Surat Thani province with a student group seeking to educate villagers about democracy, even though they, the students, as yet lacked a clear concept of democracy. The implications of this conceptual murkiness, tied as it was to a compulsion to explain something, became clear during one particular meeting. The meeting had just started, with the students saying that they were there to talk about democracy, prachaathipatai (ประชาธิปไตย), which has the ring of a personal name. One of the villagers then spoke up, asking, “Who is this Prachaatipatai?” Human rights, she continued, faced the same sort of problem: 80 to 90 percent of Thai do not know of human rights. This is a different sort of claim than saying they do not understand what human rights are, as she did not understand what democracy was when she was a teenager. Rather, it says that, like the man who asked, “Who is this Prachaathipatai?” they do not yet have a place for human rights, in contrast to the way that she had a place for democracy, just not an explanation of it.
Here, the inability of the teenage student to explain democracy is not congruent with the villagers who, so to speak, had no place prepared for it, in the way that someone who has no familiarity with board games will have no place prepared for a piece called the king in chess. Those, like the professor when younger, who had heard of democracy but could not explain what it meant, received it like something overheard.31 Crucially, to make something audible is not to make it intelligible. Making sense of something overheard is a work of transfiguration of the sort we saw with Saneh’s understanding of human rights through a Buddhist grammar of freedom and liberation.
This is a second aspect of the trope of overhearing that is important for our understanding of human rights’ emergence: it is not a matter of passive reception but is rather an active engagement—a making-familiar (or making-one’s-own). Pim had worked in the Bureau of Human Rights Promotion in the ONHRC, where she worked closely with the director, Dr. Chuchai. While she had a graduate degree from an American university in women’s studies, Pim had no special training in human rights and initially was unsure how to promote or teach them or even what they meant. Her problem resembled what the professor faced when she went to disseminate democratic ideas in Surat Thani. Pim tried to educate herself, but the challenge was that commissioners had differing views of human rights, leaving her unsure whom to consult. She began work on public education campaigns uncertain if the message she was delivering was right, and she had difficulty securing enabling recommendations from commissioners for her projects. The trouble Pim faced was twofold. First, she ran up against her own uncertainties about what to teach and how to teach it because human rights were unfamiliar. Second, she found that the NHRC was beset by the “culture of bureaucratic ranks” that left commissioners somewhat inaccessible to her. This system of ranks had a divisive influence on the director of the ONHRC, too, who found, despite his position, that his proposals for pursuing human rights fell on deaf ears.
Buddhism and Social Action
Dr. Chuchai came to the ONHRC from the Ministry of Public Health, which had become home to many leftist student activists of the 1970s. In a way, his model for human rights appeared entirely congruent with the Buddhist ethic, promoted by Saneh and Khunying Amphorn, to awaken potential human rights violators to the possibilities of abuse. Dr. Chuchai was pivotal in drafting the master plan of the NHRC’s inaugural strategic plan. The plans were proactive in conception, modeled on the Ministry of Public Health system of surveillance for disease, and called for the establishment of mechanisms to work on focus groups or subcommissions. The idea, Dr. Chuchai explained in his office, was to identify high-risk areas like juvenile correction centers and meet with children, families, and officials to collect data on abuses and then set up fora to find solutions. Central to this model was that all parties would search for ways to resolve problems together. This way, he said, they could undertake “capacity building” for officials (not unlike the awakening Saneh advocated), so that they could learn how to abide by the constitution and avoid violating children’s rights.
An important agency for Dr. Chuchai was the police, who he said are major violators of human rights. His wish, though, was to show the police data on abuses without blaming them and without taking an adversarial posture; in short, he advocated the nonconfrontational ethos of Thai culture, as he saw it. To accomplish this, the NHRC would invite retired police officers to accompany them on investigations so that the police would listen and be able to hear their findings. Again, he reiterated, it was important to remain sensitive to Thai culture. Not all commissioners shared this view, though. Lowering his voice, Dr. Chuchai said that over half of the commissioners had rejected the original master plan he had drawn up according to these principles.
“Because they come from NGOs they are anti-bureaucratic. The problem is that they are [now] national commissioners, not national activists.” The commissioners, Dr. Chuchai continued, spend most of their time on case-to-case investigations and are only reactive.
“The commissioners are interested in their own areas, not in strategic foci. There has been a proliferation of sub-commissions,” he concluded. They have brought a negative attitude toward government agencies that has resulted in their adversarial approach to human rights. Dr. Chuchai found this regrettable because with the “charisma and social capital” of the commissioners, he felt that they could successfully mediate with government agencies to avoid violations.
Politics Otherwise
If members of the NHRC intervene in debates on Buddhism and politics in Thailand to promote an immanent understanding of Buddhism (one occupied with action in this world) and use human rights to awaken people to their own possibilities for liberation by avoiding abusive acts, then it is noteworthy that they have not incorporated ideas of monarchy into this understanding. Throughout my fieldwork at the NHRC and with lawyers working under its auspices, mention of the monarchy in relation to human rights was conspicuously absent. A quick look at the rhetoric and tactics of political movements and political leaders for several generations shows consistent—even pervasive—invocations of the monarchy. It seems unthinkable to mount any sort of political campaign without proclaiming loyalty to the king.
I contrast this form of political expression and the silence on kingship in discussions of human rights to emphasize the extent to which the NHRC was cultivating an alternative politics: not just another position within an existing political formation but a differently oriented politics. Commissioners like Saneh and Khunying Amphorn maintain the relationship between Buddhism and politics but direct it away from an explanation for or justification of social inequality based on kamma and toward a defense of human equality and commensurability, which lie at the heart of their picture of human rights. Prevailing ideas of kingship are coterminous with a view of Buddhism that places kammic inequality in the foreground, the king holding his position through kammic superiority. It follows that those who argue through Buddhism for equality rather than social stratification must also mute the kammic justification of kingship. Although they may not be in a position or of the disposition32 to argue the legitimacy of kingship, promoting human rights through an egalitarian Buddhism reflecting Buddhadasa’s denial of the importance of kamma in favor of quotidian striving for nibbana implies a corresponding denial of the link between spiritual merit and legitimate authority.33 It seems, indeed, a refutation of royalism generally.
What, however, might this sort of political orientation look like in practice? On the whole, the NHRC adopted an adversarial approach to human rights, preferring to pursue individual cases on a plaintiff-defendant model, particularly human rights causes (like community or environmental rights), in the mode