Boonsan Jitjan has gone through a political transformation over the last 14 months. Once an avid supporter of Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, she has now joined the rural poor in its growing chorus taking him to task.

Thus, the 56-year-old Boonsan has joined hundreds of Thais from the poverty-stricken northern provinces, who have been staging a protest rally outside the walls of Government House here for a week now.

They have come to complain about what they call the lack of sincerity by the Thaksin administration in alleviating the plight of the rural poor, one of his key pledges before he became premier in Jan 2001.

''We had faith in him because he was different from any other prime minister. He identified our problems and promised to solve them,'' says Boonsan of Thaksin, whom she voted for at last year's poll. ''We might not vote for him any more if he will not do anything.''

''This is our second demonstration in Bangkok,'' 54-year-old Paeng Satsuwan, who like Boonsan hails from the poor north-eastern province of Udon Ratchathani, says of the crowds seated along the pavement, protest banners unfurled, outside the buildings where Thailand's central government functions.

''There have been protests in Ubon Ratchathani, but there was no government response,'' she adds.

Although still small in number, these voices have come to represent a shift in Thailand's political landscape: the growing rift between Thaksin and the rural poor, a constituency that backed his party, Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thai) and helped put it in power.

Financial relief

Thaksin, Thailand's wealthiest business tycoon, won the Jan 2001 poll with the largest victory margin in the country's political history.

What endeared candidate Thaksin to the rural poor was his populist platform. In addition to being the first Thai political leader in years to identify poverty reduction as an important national issue, he assured the rural constituency he was wooing that financial relief would come to help them out of the poverty trap.

These campaign pledges included the village fund scheme, where a one-million baht (RM88,350) loan was promised to each of the 78,000 villages across Thailand to help them generate extra income.

Two other carrots that Thaksin dangled were the deferred farm debt repayment scheme for rural farmers in the red and a medical programme, where the poor were to be charged only 30 baht (RM2.70) for every hospital visit.

Furthermore, in an act departing from Thailand's political tradition and a public relations coup, Thaksin cemented his bonds with the rural poor by joining them for a lunch on the street shortly after becoming prime minister.

But in the months since these populist platitudes, the rural poor have grown wise.

''They have realised that Thaksin was far from sincere, specially after he pledged to personally look into the problems of the rural poor,'' says Bantorn Ondam, a sociologist and advisor to the Assembly of the Poor, a national forum championing the concerns of the country's poor.

Most of the rural poor, he adds, want the government to address the root causes of their predicament than offering temporary solutions.

''Many grassroots people want to be self-reliant and free of any debts, for one. They have realised that the government's million-baht scheme will only add to their burdens.''

Propaganda policies

Somkiat Pongpaiboon, a lecturer at Rajabhat Institute, makes a similar argument in the English-language daily Bangkok Post yesterday: ''It's time the government shows us that its policies to improve the lives of the poor is real and not just propaganda to enhance its popularity.''

The Assembly of the Poor has identified 16 anti-poor policies that plague rural communities.

These include state polices that have deprived villagers access to natural resources in order to satisfy big business, to villagers being displaced by the construction of dams to generate power to feed the electricity demand of cities.

Also in the list is the habit by Thai governments to confiscate land without compensation.

Boonsan and Paeng are among those who have been victimised by such policies. They lost their rice fields due to one such dam being built by the state.

The World Bank lends weight to the argument that the most deprived in Thailand is the rural population. ''There is an extremely strong regional dimension to both poverty levels and the reduction of poverty over time,'' it states in a Nov 2001 report, Thailand Social Monitor: Poverty and Public Policy.

''In 1998, for instance, nearly one-half (48.8 percent) of all North-easterners were poor, as compared to only 6 percent of Bangkok residents,'' it adds. ''While the incidence of poverty is high among farm households, it is also the case that these households form a rather large group in Thailand.''

In 1999, moreover, the Bank's researchers estimated that close to 16.5 million people among Thailand's 60 million people belonged to households headed by a person whose main occupation was farming.

''The problems behind this poverty are structural,'' says Bantorn. ''Either the villagers are forced out of their lands due to flooding caused by the dams or evicted from the forests. That is why the people want the rivers back as they were.''

Bureaucracy woes

Equally troubling for Bantorn is the rural poor's inability to gain the ear of the country's bureaucrats, particularly those in the departments of agriculture, forestry, interior and the government officials handling power projects.

Witoon Lianchamroon of BioThai, a non-governmental lobby for biodiversity and community rights, agrees that Thai bureaucracy is biased against the rural poor.

''The civil servants are comfortable with the centralised system, and place greater value on development projects that help modern, middle-class urban life than ones promoting rural people.''

And even when the bureaucracy initiates programmes in the rural reaches, what matters to the village communities are not given priority, he says.

'The 1997 agriculture master plan is typical. The bureaucrats have opted to use the budget to support commercial agriculture than catering to the agricultural concerns of the village farmers,'' Witoon says.

But the rural poor refuse to give in to the status quo, want to force the country's political establishment to change  and want Thaksin to keep his promises to them.

''We want a committee to be formed to restructure the legal system and push for solutions to the long-existing problems of the poor,'' Somkiat was quoted as having told the Bangkok Post . (IPS)