"The Thai Lawyers Council is our consultant and it will help us file a lawsuit against the government," Prom told Reuters. If they cannot get payment, the farmers want their rice back so they can resell it, no matter how low the price, he said. The protests in Bangkok pit the middle class and royalist establishment against the mainly poorer supporters of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra and her brother, ex-premier Thaksin Shinawatra, who was toppled by the military in 2006. RURAL VOTE The rural vote brought Yingluck's Puea Thai Party to power in 2011 with a sweeping populist platform. But the rice program that formed part of it meant that Thailand, once the world's biggest rice exporter, was priced out of the global market. It left the country with a mountain of unsold grain and the government's intervention scheme running into funding problems. Small protests have been popping up around the rice-growing regions in the centre, north and northeast.