There was a by-election (which Bhum Jai Thai resoundingly lost) going on in the next district and Peua Thai spokesman Prompong Nopparit (whose party did win) said the Minister had been caught red-handed in a blatant act of vote-buying. 

 

If guilty, not only would Minister Chaovarat be banned from politics for 5 years himself (requiring his party to find a proxy for a proxy), but his party would risk dissolution. This is because of the strange provision in the constitution that mandates guilt by association for electoral law offences.

 

Now on this charge Minister Chaovarat does have some wiggle room. The recipient does not appear to have been eligible to vote in the by-election so it couldn’t have been a straight vote-for-cash deal. However, since his generosity was publicized, it might still be interpreted as an improper way of influencing other voters.

 

But the obvious defence would be to point out that the woman was disabled and not obviously rolling in lolly. The Minister, surely, was acting out of sheer good-hearted charity.

 

Except that the Minister decided that the water wasn’t yet hot enough.

 

Rather than point to what I have no doubt is a long record of generosity towards the deserving poor who happen also to be voters, he decided to point out that the woman in question was blind and therefore had no right to vote anyway.

 

So there’s foot number one firmly lodged in his mouth. 

 

One would have thought any politician, and especially a Minister of Interior, would know that blindness does not disqualify citizens from voting. We even produce ballot papers in Braille, for heaven’s sake. 

 

Minister Chaovarat did not stop there. The reason blind people can’t vote, he said, was because the blind are ‘legally incompetent’.

 

And there goes the second foot, sliding in right next to the first, and the Minister is flat on his arse.

 

Again, one would be appalled at such ignorance in a run-of-the-mill pol, but this is a former Minister of Social Development and Human Security speaking. 

 

He was forcefully reminded by a legally non-incompetent blind Senator and an equally non-incompetent blind university law lecturer that if you want to talk about legal incompetence, well, there’s a case on the loose over at Mahathai.

 

However, I fear that Minister may be riding a current here. People have been scrabbling for years against ingrained prejudice to ensure full rights for the disabled in Thai society.  

 

It wasn’t that long ago that the Ministry of Interior was persuaded that being deaf did not automatically make you so stupid you couldn’t be trusted to vote. And the military have at long last been forced to concede that the transgenders who turn up for recruitment should not be rejected as mental defectives. (Before you start cheering, know that they now just reject them for having ‘deformed chests’.)

 

But now we have the PAD, who say they are so well-educated that they could not possibly be susceptible to brain-washing so that the one-sided vitriolic claptrap emanating from ASTV and the Manager counts as fair comment. Before they decided to become a political party with a sort-of-swastika logo, they proposed that the rural masses, fully 70% of the population, were too weak-minded and vulnerable to vote-buying to be entrusted with the vote.

 

And a Minister now declares, quite incorrectly but so far unapologetically, that disability is a blanket condition for disenfranchisement.

 

These are worrying trends. We must never forget that the National Socialists, whose logo reminds us of that of the PAD, pursued a policy of ‘racial hygiene’. And this involved the extermination by mass murder not only of the Jewish Untermensch, but also the disabled. Unworthy of the vote, thinks the Minister. Unworthy of life, argued the Nazi eugenicists.