Dr Pridi Banomyong is remembered as one of the father’s of Thai democracy, a three time Prime Minister and a revolutionary leader of the Thai leader.
He was born in 1900 in the province of Ayutthaya, which was once the capital of Siam. His family were farmers and he had no great wealth apart from his intelligence and diligence, which enabled him to win a government scholarship to go and study in France. The French experience radically changed his mindset – as it also did for subsequent leaders of the Vietnamese and Cambodian revolutions. Pridi was the first Thai to be awarded a doctorate in law, so he did not ignore his studies. He achieved prominence among the small expatriate Thai community of students and civil servants and was elected leader of the People’s Party. From this position, when he returned to Thailand (it was still known as Siam then), he was influential in organizing the 1932 revolution which finally brought down the absolute democracy and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy. From 1933-47 he held a variety of leading governmental positions, including Regent and among his triumphs are the revocation of unequal treaties, the creation of the country’s first economic plan, the 1933 Municipality Act which permitted people to vote for democratically-elected local government figures and the creation of the Bank of Thailand and Thammasat University. During the Second World War, he was the secret leader of the resistance against the occupying Japanese. It was thanks to this ‘Free Thai’ movement that Thailand was recognised as an independent country after the war, notably by the USA.
However, all of these achievements were not enough for the behind-the-scenes ‘dark forces’ which have blighted Thailand for centuries. Pridi was labelled a ‘communist’ and forced to live in France for a year while he cleared his name against the obviously false charges laid against them. He managed to do this and returned to Thailand to lead a movement to ban communism from the country altogether – there was a general feeling of fear that the victory of the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese civil war in 1947 would lead to a grassroots desire for the same for Thailand, especially among the ethnic Chinese in the country. The charges were brought back and he lived for decades in exile in China, before his ashes were brought back after his death in 1983 in an act of posthumous reconciliation.
Sometimes looking again at the politicians of the past throws the actions of those of the present into sharper relief. Often those of the past appear to be giants compared to the venal pygmies of the modern world.
