Kasit piromya biography of mahatma

INTRODUCTION

You’re now listening to “Advocate” by APHR, ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights.

Can you maybe explain a little bit to the constitution about the current Thai constitution to people who don’t already know about it?

The first point is that the Senate, until the 15 May, okay, next month, was nominated by the military establishment who staged the coup d’etat a few years back.

How do you decentralize and delegate most of the power from the center to the peripheries and so on, to allow for more participation by the people and for the people to decide about their everyday life by themselves, but not to be controlled by the central government, either from Bangkok, Tokyo or Jakarta and so on.

So these are some of the examples.

He received early education at Bangkok Christian College and then went to study at the high school level at St Joseph's College, Darjeeling. They are not or they have not been political activists. And they each compete in the national elections to win the seat on what you call whoever gets the majority in the constituents.

That’s a big disappointment. Or maybe they are listening more to the military establishment or to the conservative establishment instead of acting as a sovereign democratic institution, political parties and so on. Too much talk without much of the substance, that is not detrimental to him. So when I was born in 1944, Thailand was already a constitutional monarchy.

How can they serve the people? He also served as Foreign Minister of Thailand from 2008 to 2011. Do you see any prospect under the current government of this constitution being reformed?

Not much, because a lot of saying for the past seven, eight months and so on, you know, because they have been very slow, because the idea was to have a drafting assembly of about, say, 200 people.

Khun Kasit, you mentioned your role as a member of parliament and a politician for a few years. Because, like, to reform political parties, you need to reform the law, but to reform the law, you need the political party’s support, you know. But they are being quite in combat or circumvented by quite a strict NGO law and there is too much bureaucratic control of the life and the activities of the NGO’s.

And Thailand still needs to come to a consensus of what type of a democratic society or not we’re going to be.

This is the situation so far. He resigned from the Democrat Party disagreeing with its decision to join a coalition government led by a former general who stage the coup d’etat in 2014.

Kasit Piromya has become active in the promotion and protection of democracy and human rights.

Like, for example, in Indonesia, a lot of the political parties are also the same. And we have been friends.

He passed away a few years ago, but he introduced me to APHR or to the ASEAN Caucus for Aung San Suu Kyi. And when he passed away, I more or less took over from him the Thailand side of the APHR activities. I think political parties in Thailand are much less sophisticated and answer only to the political families or the political personality and not to the people and not to the members of the respective political parties.

We have to make sure that political parties are political parties of the people and run on a democratic principle and not a sort of a company or a business entity of a particular family or of a particular vested interest group.