Bangkok, Thailand - Among all the angry protesters now trying to push him out of office -- the students, the workers, the farmers and the artists -- it is an army of 10,000 celibate vegetarian Buddhists that may be the most dogged of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's opponents.
When Thaksin rose to prominence in the late 1990s, members of a fringe Buddhist sect called Santi Asoke were among his original foot troops -- the Dharma Army. The abstemious adherents hoped that the multibillionaire businessman's wealth would give him the luxury to dodge temptation. They counted on him to change Thailand's culture of corruption.
These days, however, with Thaksin accused of perpetuating the same old crony capitalism, the Dharma Army has mutinied with the bitterness born of being burned. Willing to sit for days and nights to make its views heard, the sect has brought its vegetarian kitchens and its stamina to the protest rallies, trying to stake a claim at the moral sharp end of the anti-Thaksin forces.
Santi Asoke's lifestyle and politics make many Thais uncomfortable. The sect is ostracized from mainstream Buddhism, whose monks refuse to recognize founder Prah Bodhirak, a one-time TV host and rock DJ, as a legitimate religious figure.
But its best-known member, former military officer-turned-politician Chamlong Srimuang, is a moral pillar of Thai politics. Late last month, Chamlong came off the fence and to the forefront of an anti-Thaksin movement that, lacking the votes in Parliament, has tried to drive the prime minister from office with street power.
From public stages and on TV, Chamlong now denounces his former protégé. The Dharma Army contends it was duped.
''We did not know what he was like,'' founder Bodhirak said in an interview at a rally in Bangkok's royal grounds, explaining why Santi Asoke once backed the prime minister it now rebels against. He spoke surrounded by brown-robed ''monks'' and other Santi Asoke members in blue uniforms, who murmured agreement. ``Thaksin has revealed it was a mistake to believe in him.''
The Dharma Army hardly has the troops to push Thaksin out of office on its own. Santi Asoke is a small sect, with most estimates putting its members at no more than 10,000. They live a modest communal lifestyle in nine villages across Thailand, sticking to what they claim is a back-to-Buddhist-basics regime of vegetarianism, eating just one meal a day, and sexual abstinence.
On one side is Thaksin, the self-made businessman who wants to open the country to foreign investment and ease credit, and believes he deserves a bow for making Thailand one of Southeast Asia's most dynamic economies. When the street protests against him threatened to paralyze Thai politics, he tried to break their back with characteristic boldness, calling new elections for April 2.
On the other side are those who worry about the cultural costs of the rush to a more Western-style capitalism. They don't like Thaksin's freewheeling talk of free-trade agreements with other countries, or the proliferation of mall culture and its consumption ethic. Where the prime minister sees economic growth, they see an elite grown richer but the masses left behind, awash in newly accrued personal debt.
''It is not that debt is moral or immoral,'' said Sang Kwan, 39, a Santi Asoke member who was also at the rally. ``It is that debt imposes a kind of suffering because we have to worry about it.''
If Santi Asoke's philosophy has caught the public's anti-Thaksin mood, its disproportionate clout in Thai politics comes from its best-known member. Chamlong remains a populist hero, a man who played a leading role in the bloody 1992 pro-democracy rally that toppled Thailand's last military regime, and whose modest lifestyle and lack of personal ambitions give him credibility with the masses in this country of 65 million people.