Songkran, the Buddhist festival marking Thailand’s new year that begins on April 13th, was once, it is said, a mellow, pious affair. Thai people visited temples to sprinkle scented water on monks, symbolically bathing them. It is now a nationwide water war, where the weapons are water-pistols, buckets and hoses, the battlefield is the street and the fuel that keeps the armies going is often alcoholic.
Survivors have a ball, albeit a soaking-wet one. But alongside those who have long lamented the corruption of an ancient religious tradition are others who worry about the growing number of casualties. Last year 320 people died in 3,129 road accidents, up from 271 in 2011. Of those who died in 2012, three-fifths were driving or riding pillion on motorcycles. Most were not wearing helmets. Most had been drinking.
The carnage this year has already started. On April 11th, in the warm-up to the holiday proper, and already the first of seven dangerous days, 39 people across the country died and 342 were injured in 326 road accidents.
An effort has been made to tighten up. Alcohol-free zones have been declared in 86 locations in 66 provinces, after a campaign by the culture ministry, the Thailand Health Promotion Foundation and the Stop Drink Network.
But a campaign for a national ban on alcohol over the holiday was thwarted. Songkran is good for tourism, one of the country’s most important industries. Few of the white-skinned tourists who turn out seem to mind that they are especially favoured targets for a dousing.
Helmets are already compulsory for motorcyclists and drinking and driving is illegal. The problem seems to be not so much the laws and regulations, as the enforcement of them.
Brett Bivans of the International Centre for Alcohol Policies, a not-for-profit group financed by multinational drinks companies to promote responsible drinking, says that many traffic policemen are loth, for example, to use their breathalysers to test drivers in their own villages—and still less in other peoples’.
In Thailand’s neighbour, Myanmar, breathalysers are usually not even available. Thingyan, the Burmese variant on the new-year water festival, makes Songkran seem tame. In Yangon, the main city, open-top trucks tour the streets to be drenched by what amount to water-cannon fired from temporary road-side pavilions sponsored by local businesses.
As each day lurches on, Myanmar's drenchers and drenchees alike lose most of their inhibitions and all of their sobriety. In the years of military rule, the festivities could have a rather desperate, angry undertone. Last year, falling just a fortnight after the by-elections that put Aung San Suu Kyi and the opposition party she leads into parliament, it had the euphoric air of a post-revolutionary celebration.
No reliable statistics are available for Thingyan casualties. But it is a fair bet that one sad side-effect of the country’s reforms is that they will mount.