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Self-ruination or salvation
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
The country hangs on a cord braided from Gotabaya and Ranil — ugly, absurd, and the only one there is. Victor Ivan asks whose fault it was and what escape would actually require.
With the President and Prime Minister apparently willing, Victor Ivan sets out the reform plan itself — numbered, sequenced, and to be finished with a referendum inside three years.
Victor Ivan recalls telling an audience the country would go bankrupt, and Mangala Samaraweera rising to accept it. The column argues that anarchy is a worse danger than dictatorship.
Ranil Wickremesinghe is appointed Prime Minister and Victor Ivan calls it a good omen. He also tells the youth movement plainly that its slogan cost it the reforms it could have won.
A working document rather than an essay: Victor Ivan's numbered proposal for an interim administration and an interim constitution, written for a forum of people's representatives.
Blackouts, queues and no plan. Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is constitutionally primitive, and that an interim constitution is the only way to keep the collapse from becoming anarchy.
The New Year dawned with the Central Bank declaring bankruptcy. Victor Ivan puts the hard question to the protesters: if GotaGoHome succeeds, what exactly will have changed?
Written a week after Mirihana. Victor Ivan reads the protest movement as a direct democratic uprising and asks what it can actually win, beyond removing one man.
More about the solution for Sri Lanka’s current crisis
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Radio frequencies are public property given away for nothing, and MPs are traders in the state they govern. Victor Ivan uses both to argue that a balance-of-payments fix alone will change nothing.
A programme in two phases: go to the IMF, bring the Government into a reform process, pass an interim constitution, and complete the new one by referendum. Written as the queues were forming.
Corruption, not just monetary mismanagement, is what emptied the reserves. Victor Ivan follows the vehicle permits back to J.R. Jayewardene and the predatory system he built around them.
Nagananda Kodithuwakku's petition asks whether Gotabaya Rajapaksa was qualified to stand at all. Victor Ivan follows the citizenship question and asks why neither rival candidate ever raised it.
Was there an invisible hand behind the Easter attack?
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Cardinal Ranjith goes to the Pope and to Geneva, and Shani Abeysekera sits in a cell. Victor Ivan lays out what he calls the puzzle behind the Easter Sunday attack and asks who benefited from it.
Written weeks before the fuel queues turned into protests. Victor Ivan traces the fertiliser theory back to the two men who sold it, and says the country will soon be declared bankrupt.
On the 74th independence anniversary Victor Ivan finds the public discussion unusually advanced, then argues that Parliament itself is illegally constituted and points to the Jayewardene Centre as the founding example.
Champika Ranawaka and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, judged side by side. Victor Ivan credits both where their proposals are sound and faults both for saying nothing about the judiciary or Parliament.
A novice captain took the helm in the worst weather at sea. Victor Ivan reads Gotabaya Rajapaksa's presidency that way, then turns to Geiger and the curse laid on kings in the chronicles.
President Chandrika and former Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayke
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Chandrika Kumaratunga launches her memoir and Shirani Bandaranayake gives the keynote. Victor Ivan, who wrote a book about Chandrika, listens to the speech and sets the record against it.
Rohan Samarajiva answers back, so Victor Ivan sets out the case against independent commissions in detail, drawing on India and Hong Kong to show what an appointing body has to be before it can work.
A proposed way out of the trap: an interim constitution, a constituent assembly, and the observation — from Colvin R. de Silva — that removing even an insane president would take more than two years.
