SINGAPORE — One day she's meeting flood victims, cheerily handing out relief supplies in a baseball cap and camouflage trousers. The next she's sitting among worshippers at a Buddhist temple, legs folded under her elegant silk tube skirt, a smile stretched across her face.
And sometimes — only sometimes — Sineenat Bilaskalayani is seen in the same frame as the king and queen of Thailand. On these occasions she is relegated to the background, just another bejeweled member of the royal entourage. The queen does not appear to make eye contact.
Sineenat is Thailand's royal noble consort, a title given to a companion of the king who is not his wife. She is the first person named to that position in nearly a century. At a time of unprecedented ferment against Thailand's monarchy, she and her unusual role have been thrust into the spotlight.
In choreographed public appearances, the 35-year-old Sineenat, a former army nurse raised in the northern countryside, has been the beaming, youthful picture of accessibility, posing for selfies and crouching to clasp the hands of genuflecting fans. For a palace that has cultivated an aura of near-godliness despite Thailand's pretenses to constitutional rule, the images suggest a concerted effort to win admirers with her common touch.
"It's strategic," said Pavin Chachavalpongpun, a Thai academic. "It's a way of narrowing the gap between the monarchy and the people."
But to the monarchy's critics — including thousands who have risked arrest and braved police water cannons and tear gas to join Thailand's greatest pro-democracy protests in years — Sineenat represents something more troubling: the return of polygyny to a royal court they view as regressive and feudal, and a reminder of the unpredictable behavior of the 68-year-old, thrice-divorced King Maha Vajiralongkorn.
It was just last year, after all, that Sineenat disappeared — reproached for "misbehavior and disloyalty" in an extraordinary, two-page statement in the royal gazette that accused her of trying to outshine the queen and causing discord in the palace.
Sineenat was stripped of her military rank and the titles the king had piled upon her. For nearly a year there was no news of her whereabouts. Whispered comparisons alluded to other spurned lovers of the king who had basically vanished — like his second wife, who has lived in anonymity overseas after he divorced her and disowned four of their children, or his third, who has not been seen publicly since their split in 2014.
Then, just as suddenly, Sineenat was back in the royal glare. In August, a six-line command from the king restored her titles without explanation and declared that her record was unblemished.
This fall, with Vajiralongkorn making a rare extended visit to Thailand from his usual residence in Germany, Sineenat has played a key role in the palace's PR blitz, popping up across the country, usually solo, though hardly ever near the king.
"It seems that the king thinks of her like his own private Barbie doll," said Tamara Loos, a history professor at Cornell University who studies the Thai monarchy. "He puts her away and takes her out at will."
