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The path the professionals should choose
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
The last column of the run. Victor Ivan turns from politicians to professionals — lawyers, engineers, accountants, auditors — and argues that no one should be trusted to fix the country who has not first fixed their own field.
Victor Ivan sets out his own position plainly: he opposed Gotabaya's candidacy, took him a reform plan anyway, and asks now whether the country can survive until the next government without one.
With the Rajapaksa brothers gone, the power struggle has taken a stranger shape. Victor Ivan examines the arrest of Wasantha Mudalige, the militant wing of the Aragalaya, and what lies outside the constitutional framework.
The World Bank, the IMF and the EU all say the political crisis must be solved alongside the economic one. Victor Ivan says the opposition parties are the obstacle, and calls this a golden opportunity being wasted.
Not corruption but ignorance, Victor Ivan argues — a literate society that never learned to think. He traces it through the colonial historians, through Dharmapala, and through a constitution violated since 1948 without protest.
The Aragalaya put system change at the centre of the argument and then the moment passed. Victor Ivan asks why the Opposition and the JVP both want no part of a reform programme.
Written from a sick bed after Shehan Karunatilaka praised 'Paradise in Tears'. Victor Ivan recalls Mangala Samaraweera's intervention, the Indian investigator who bought three copies, and the ten-year struggle against Sarath Silva.
Victor Ivan answers the anger his defence of Ranil Wickremesinghe provoked, describes how the man's public image was manufactured against him, and states plainly what his own role in all this has been.
Even with an IMF package the hardest part is still ahead. Victor Ivan returns to the JVP's second insurrection for what it shows about how a power struggle turns into a bloodbath.
The Aragalaya had a sensitive heart and no mature brain. Victor Ivan sets out what it achieved, why it failed, and what compromise the country would now have to reach.
With the protest camp cleared, Victor Ivan weighs the repression against the anarchy it forestalled, examines the detentions under the PTA, and judges the morality of the Aragalaya itself.
Answering the critics of 'Ranil's destiny'. Victor Ivan asks who else was available for the presidency, weighs the charges against Wickremesinghe one by one, and returns to the shortage of mature leaders.
Victor Ivan describes taking his reform plan to Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the uprising, then makes the case for Ranil Wickremesinghe — a man, he argues, whose character the media deliberately destroyed.
Gotabaya fled because he was weak, not because the Aragalaya was strong. Victor Ivan restates the constitutional argument he has made throughout and says what the movement should demand next.
Victor Ivan measures the July uprising against Magna Carta, the American and French revolutions and the Indian independence movement, and locates the limitation that decided its outcome.
Written in the week of 9 July. Victor Ivan admits the uprising disproved his own forecast, sets out what distinguished it from the JVP insurrections, and asks what it can end in.
Mao on falling into pits. Victor Ivan argues that neither the protesters nor the opposition parties who borrowed their slogan have worked out whether it can actually be done.
COPE's daily hearings show where the money went. Victor Ivan notes that everyone is shouting at someone to go home and nobody is asking anyone to take charge.
Eight practical measures for living through the crisis — fuel rationing, public transport, solar conversion for expatriate-owned homes — inside a case for an all-party government.
An all-party consensus, and quickly. Victor Ivan offers his reform proposals as a specimen of the scale required rather than a text to be adopted, and warns of the stage below the present one.
