Updated: “Dangerous” calendar banned

New year brings new calendars, with banks and companies producing them for customers and others producing them for colleagues and friends. Often they have a royal theme or might be cartoon figures. Some companies, most notably the giant Boonrawd Breweries, has produced calendars featuring skimpily-clad models.

The military junta has declared that it did not ban one particular calendar although it seems to support the Roi-et governor’s ban on the calendar. Not raunchy pin-ups, but a particular calendar the jumpy junta’s provincial minion considered “politically dangerous.”

Matichon reports that the military dictatorship’s spokesman, Major-General Sansern Kaewkamnerd has stated that the production and distribution of a calendar featuring Thaksin and Yingluck Shinawatra was not banned by the junta, but that the junta supports the local authorities banning the calendar as it is potentially politically divisive.

This is part of a continuing process of keeping Yingluck and Thaksin out of the headlines – don’t even mention Thaksin’s name! – in the hope of weaning the “uneducate” off their Thaksin “addiction” before the constitutional referendum and the promised 2017 election.

Update: Roi-et Governor Anusorn Kaewkangwan has “confirmed that his office was looking into the distribution of calendars adorned with photos of the former premiers Thaksin and Yingluck Shinawatra during the New Year festival.” He says 200 calendars were distributed “by a political party coordinator” at a “local administrators’ conference in Chiang Khwan district last Wednesday.” The junta’s governor is now scouring the province because “it was viewed as inappropriate for authorities to provide free calendars symbolising any political party.”