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Playing with the crisis
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Victor Ivan notes that he predicted bankruptcy three years earlier as a political analyst rather than an economist, then sets out what the import restrictions and the fertiliser ban will do next.
Not a manifesto but a method: Victor Ivan sets out how a mass of citizens could file fundamental rights petitions together, and what a Centre of Public Movement built on that would be able to do.
A nation, Victor Ivan writes, can go mad the way a person can. The column diagnoses the intellectual paucity behind the debt crisis and sets out what an IMF programme would have to be built on.
The utopian Sinhala-Buddhist state promised in 2019 and 2020 did not arrive. Victor Ivan argues that of everyone deceived by the racist project, the Sinhala Buddhists themselves were deceived most.
Basil Rajapaksa's National List seat, examined against the Constitution and the international covenant Sri Lanka has already been found to have breached. Victor Ivan asks whether the law will simply be ignored.
Replies came in defending Champika Ranawaka, so Victor Ivan answers them. He calls Champika a genius who is simultaneously philosopher and exorcist, and asks what that contradiction cost the country.
Two puzzles put to the leaders who want power: why keep the presidency, and why ban chemical fertiliser? Victor Ivan uses Champika Ranawaka's answers to both as the test case.
What could be done for agriculture if the fertiliser ban were lifted: co-operative societies, the wild animal problem, dairy and beef, dhal and chillies, and paddy. A practical column, unusually free of politics.
Dharmapala and Marx, the Soulbury Constitution broken before the ink was dry, and the citizenship of the plantation workers. Victor Ivan traces the decline to the choices made at the moment of independence.
2015 was the last chance, Victor Ivan writes, and it was spent dishonestly. The column goes back through independence, the 1978 constitution and revolution and counter-revolution to explain the vacuum now left.
Minorities, the judiciary, and a cabinet Victor Ivan says cannot see past the next few months. He argues that with both parties failing, only public pressure is left.
Written at a politician's request, this is Victor Ivan's programme in five numbered parts — nation building, the judiciary, the system of governance, empowering the public, and the country's place between India and China.
With the military unable to turn the wheels either, Victor Ivan calls for a common platform across the parties — and, failing that, for the Opposition to build one itself.
The overnight fertiliser ban. Victor Ivan sets the President's organic dream against the history of paddy cultivation and the chemistry of soil, and warns of the harvest that will follow.
Victor Ivan turns on the men already planning their presidential runs and asks how anyone can want the office without first proposing to abolish what it has done to the country.
Six opposition leaders, all of them products of the old order. Victor Ivan asks what a mature leader would look like and why the post-independence period has produced so few.
Anarchy, bankruptcy, a misread geopolitics and a Geneva resolution. Victor Ivan reads the failure of the state as something now being completed rather than merely risked.
Anti-Muslim feeling, the forced cremations, and what Victor Ivan says the National Intelligence Service did. The column argues the old era has ended and asks what should be built in its place.
A sequel to the previous week's column. Victor Ivan goes back to Turnour's Mahavamsa, to Anagarika Dharmapala and to the growth of literacy to show where Sinhala-Buddhist racism got its history from.
From the Mahavamsa to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Victor Ivan follows one line of thought through Sri Lankan history and argues that the era it produced is now, at last, ending.
