The recent deployment of the big-bag dyke by the government has come to represent a very visible aspect of a top-down, centralised approach that ignores the issues of justice and fairness. The big bag floodwall has become a symbol of what is wrong and unjust about Thailand's national development over the past decades.

Since Sunday, a few groups of disgruntled residents who are negatively affected because they live on the "wrong" side of the floodwall have decided to protest and destroy some of the one-tonne bags and no one knows when such actions will cease for good.

The Yingluck Shinawatra administration and the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration have failed utterly to articulate or explain the need for people on the other side to accept more water in order to save inner Bangkok. Out of the blue, one day authorities just decided that big bags will be the saviour of the inner city and the unlucky folks outside the barriers will just have to put up with more water. This happened with no advance consultation and no fair compensation being offered from the outset.

It took weeks before people in both the fringes of Bangkok like Don Muang and north of Bangkok in Pathum Thani's Lam Luk Ka district to decide that they had been unfairly made to sacrifice in silence and that they must do something about it. Prior to that most of the Bangkok-based national media paid little or no interest in the justice and fairness issues of the big bags, that is, until the big bags were removed or destroyed, threatening the inner city with a deluge.

Yes, society can't exist as a society if its members are unwilling to sacrifice when there's a need to save the majority or the strategic parts of society. But again, there can be no society when people who are not regarded as important are neglected and forced to endure more suffering and hardships without justice and fairness so that the rich people in the central part of the capital can go on enjoying their lives as usual.

The lesson of the big bag conflict is that Thai society is fragmented and not democratic or just enough in seeking solutions.

Earlier this week, when the big bags were first dismantled by angry residents in the Don Muang area, the Post Today newspaper was quick to run a scary main front-page headline stating, "Fallen Heaven" (sawan loem). This suggests that Bangkok is heaven while the rest may not be as celestial and those outside Bangkok may see it differently.

Although the news pictures of people taking matters into their own hands and defying the authorities' "solution" are disturbing to many, they can also be interpreted as ordinary folks increasingly rejecting top-down government "solutions" that they have no say in. They could even be considered a positive sign for the future of participatory democracy.

The authorities will have to adapt and come up with a more convincing solution that takes the interests of not just the central business district of Bangkok into consideration if they're to avoid more resistance.

The centralisation of Bangkok as a primate city which dominates the rest of the Kingdom will also have to be reviewed as more and more people are saying they will not accept the idea of unconditionally placing Bangkok above the rest at all cost as it was clearly shown in the conflict. The claim that since Bangkok is the centre of virtually everything, it must be saved and receive more preferential treatment than others, is in a way an unjust and self-perpetuating remark if it comes without a genuine attempt to decentralise power and wealth to other parts of the country. Such a ethos has increasingly become the very thing that generates resentment.