New charter will only spur opposition if it is too one-sided

The majority of reformers in the club showed their true colours when the NRC voted 175:39 to shoot down a proposal from the council’s temporary whips to nominate five “outsiders” – in addition to 15 NRC members – for the Constitution Drafting Committee (CDC).

In fact the room for constitution drafting is very narrow. The current Constitution authorises the junta to handpick the chairperson of the CDC to dictate the charter drafting. The NRC has a quota of 20 seats in the CDC while the National Legislative Assembly (NLA), the Cabinet and the junta have five each on the charter drafting committee.

The current Charter says the NRC, NLA, Cabinet and the junta have the right to ‘propose’ people to sit in the CDC in accordance with their quota. That means they can propose anybody, not specifically only their members, to be the constitution drafters.

Rather than thinking of people participation and inclusive reform, the NRC decided to propose only ‘its people’ to draft the constitution, rejecting an idea to invite representatives of major political parties or other groups to join the task.

Drafting and approving the new constitution is the only key task the NRC has been commissioned to do. If it does not allow so-called people participation to join the drafting charter, there is no other chance for people outside its jurisdiction to participate in this reform.

For sure, the NLA, the Cabinet and the junta would do the same – or at best they might pick some ‘like-minded’ outsiders to sit on the CDC.

It can be imagined that the new constitution will be nothing more than a charter for the winners which aims to limit, if not get rid of, the role of their enemies in politics or administration of the country.

Many NRC members argued that they reserved the right of constitution-drafting only for insiders because they didn’t want rivalries from previous political conflicts to continue in the constitution drafting forum. That argument is very pretentious since there is no neutral party in the reform council.

Nearly all have participated in many ways directly or indirectly in protesting against the previous government. Otherwise, from the beginning they would not have been picked to sit in the “club”. Ideally, reforms and the drawing up of a new charter should be undertaken by a non-partisan party without prejudice to any side. 

Unfortunately, no such thing exists in Thailand anymore. A possible solution is to select representatives of all parties to sit, proportionately, to find the best compromise solutions for political development. It might take time and be complicated reaching an outcome but the new charter, if produced in an inclusive way, could be widely accepted and last longer.

It is highly possible that the new constitution will be amended by politicians as soon as they are elected to power; that is the vicious circle in this country. This set of reformers could come out to protest in the streets later to oppose any amendments to their beloved constitution. The political battle would continue, giving the military a pretext later to stage another coup.

It’s bad for Thailand that the elite, the junta and the so-called reformers are very short sighted. They are too confident in their military power to suppress and oppress their opponents permanently. They wrongly calculate the force of desire among people to participate in politics. For wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.