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The crisis and Anura Kumara
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Anura Kumara Dissanayake says the JVP is ready to lead. Victor Ivan, who knows the party's history from the inside, weighs that claim against what its violence did to the country.
Some insights into the NMSJ’s proposed constitutional reforms
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
The National Movement for Social Justice publishes its reform proposals, and Victor Ivan finds the shadow of the 19th Amendment over them — another attempt, he argues, to tie down a president who remains above the law.
How the spine of the judiciary was broken. Victor Ivan follows the line from the taming of Parliament through Neville Samarakoon to Sarath Silva, and asks what a court could still do in a crisis like this.
Sri Lanka as an unsolvable puzzle. Victor Ivan names the crash and dates it — roughly a year away, before the next presidential election — and asks what could be put in place before then.
Answering a critic in Anidda who called the People's Constitution a myth, Victor Ivan turns to South Africa: P.W. Botha's successor negotiated a transition from a position of strength, and Sri Lanka's president could do the same.
Reading the Budget, Victor Ivan finds no vision in it beyond holding on to power, and repeats that cutting imports is not a solution to a balance of payments crisis — going to the IMF is.
Against the constitution being written by a committee the President appointed. Victor Ivan sets out what a participatory constitution would require and how a mass agitation could win one.
Twenty-three numbered points on the 2025 election and the constitution being drafted for it — including Basil Fernando's verdict that the document is spurious, and Victor Ivan's proposal for a public-interest case against it.
First the fertiliser ban, then the ban on cattle slaughter. Victor Ivan argues the dairy herd is being destroyed to keep a vow, and that a president is a custodian of the country, not its owner.
Part three. Victor Ivan explains why leaders who call the presidency corrupt keep it anyway, revisits the common-candidate strategy of 2015, and argues reforms must be won before power is handed over, not after.
Part two turns to why liberalism never took here. Victor Ivan sets the JVP and the LTTE side by side as movements that drove their own communities into racism.
The first of three parts. Victor Ivan builds a case for a lawful uprising out of republicanism, the sovereignty of the people, and a 1991 UN Human Rights Committee judgment from Canada.
Victor Ivan asks the President, the Chief Justice and the Speaker to shut their eyes and look properly at the state they run — including a Parliament whose members trade with the government they sit in.
Written out of Victor Ivan's last conversations with Mangala Samaraweera: a numbered basic document of reform principles and a system of governance to replace the one that failed.
Going to Geneva is called treachery in Sri Lanka. Victor Ivan, who did it and won, sets out the Tony Fernando case and the judgment Parliament could reverse tomorrow if it chose to.
Some disasters are avoidable. Victor Ivan argues this one still is, and that going to the IMF — even on its conditions, even if that means selling SriLankan Airlines — is part of how.
Dicey on the rule of law, applied to a president who stands above it. Victor Ivan reads the pandemic regulations and the Easter Sunday investigations as the same failure in two settings.
Sri Lanka had every advantage against the pandemic and squandered them. Victor Ivan reads the COVID statistics, the discrepancies in them, and a set of crimes he calls mysterious.
A social-media questionnaire on how to choose a leader turned into a public argument, so Victor Ivan sets out the philosophy behind it: a transitional constitution, a constitutional assembly, and power returned to the people.
The land swap, the constitutional frauds, the things presidents do that no civilised country would tolerate. Victor Ivan catalogues indecency raised to the level of ordinary practice.
