More voters followed his lead during the April 23 election, committing the same act to join the country's undeclared civil disobedience movement.

The authorities - police and National Election Commission officials alike - were at first stunned, then confused and finally enlightened by such in-your-face acts of defiance.

They didn't know how to handle civil resistance. They knew the law had been broken but the lawbreakers weren't ignorant rural folk or weapon-wielding criminals.

Instead they were all soft-spoken, articulate, well-educated intellectuals who, after declaring their rights to resist what they considered wrongful acts by their rulers, surrendered themselves to investigations by the police without seeking special treatment. In other words, pioneers of the modern-day civil disobedience movement are challenging Thaksin and his legacy in the forum of a public trial.

The mushrooming of discontent against Thaksin's system is a new phenomenon indeed.

This isn't like the series of public rallies that have been agitated by the People's Alliance for Democracy, nor is it a noisy, go-for-broke march on the streets calling for an end to the Thaksin era.

This, interestingly enough, is more in line with famous American author Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay entitled "Civil Disobedience", which underscores the belief that people should not allow their governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences.

The group of university lecturers who staged acts of defiance at the polling booths insist that responsible citizens, faced with autocratic rule such as this one, have a duty both to avoid doing injustice directly and to avoid allowing their acquiescence to enable the government to make them agents of injustice.

Thoreau's acts of civil disobedience 157 years ago (including not paying his taxes) were motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican-American War.

Today Thai academics have been spurred to commit similar acts of peaceful rebellion because they have come to the conclusion that if they cast their ballots simply because Thaksin wanted them to make an impossible choice, they would be betraying their consciences.

Thai law specifies a jail term of up to one year and a fine of up to Bt20,000 as well as deprivation of electoral rights for five years for breaking the election law. 

But the lecturers and other defiant voters are intent upon letting the court decide whether the election law can supersede the spirit of freedom of peaceful protest, which is enshrined in Article 65 of the Constitution: "A citizen has the right to protest through peaceful means against any act to obtain the right to govern not in accordance with the provisions of this Constitution."

Thaksin, the self-styled CEO who tried to use money and a populist platform to turn the country into his own private firm, is now confronted with a movement that is using a non-violent form of non-cooperation as its main weapon.

The academics, by tearing up their ballots, were telling Thaksin in no uncertain terms that they were putting an end to any possibility that they would comply with his regime's political manipulation, which is enabled by obedience to unjust rules and regulations. In other words, they were saying that if they had cast their ballots in this snap election, they would simply have let themselves become unwitting tools of Thaksin's political machinations.

The die has been cast. Thai society will from now on see civil disobedience as a new-found tool in the broad democratic framework and conventional politicians of Thaksin's genre who consider ballot-casting to be the only important feature of democracy will find that a new challenge of unprecedented implications has arrived.

And together with Thaksinomics, the emergence of its most formidable antidote, the civil disobedience movement, will go down in as probably the most significant chapter in Thailand's unfolding political history.

Thaksin may be pulling strings from the background, but those fighting for his genuine ouster refuse to be lured into his game.

The civil disobedience activists have made it abundantly clear that they won't take part in his any of his games, because to use legal channels to fight unjust laws would be to participate in an evil machine and, what's worse, to disguise dissent as conformity with the system.

They not only don't want to have anything to do with the "evil machine"; the growing number of anti-Thaksin dissidents want, in Thoreau's terminology, to "clog the machine" as well. And they are even willing to go to jail to do that now.

Suthichai Yoon