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Reawakening of Tamil society
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
The Pothuvil to Polikandy march reads to Victor Ivan as a Tamil society waking up. He sets it beside the two Sinhala insurrections and the failure, since 1948, to build a nation any minority could belong to.
A conversation from 1991 with Dr. Neville Fernando, recalled at his death, in which a government backbencher explained how Parliament was bought — and why, Victor Ivan argues, it has never recovered.
On the 73rd independence anniversary, Victor Ivan traces the country back to 1815 and the Colebrooke reforms to ask how a state that began ahead of Asia ended at the bottom of it.
Structural reforms key to recreating the State and the social system
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
COVID as an index of state failure. Victor Ivan reads the handling of the pandemic, the soldiers placed over the civil service and the growing dependence on China as symptoms of one structural collapse.
The jailing of Ranjan Ramanayake for contempt turns public sympathy against the courts. Victor Ivan asks what has gone wrong inside the Judiciary and answers with a series of cases from his own reporting.
A president with no political education, an opposition Victor Ivan calls stupid, and a civil service filling up with soldiers. The column ends with a programme of reforms to be completed before any further election.
Victor Ivan recounts taking the collapse of the state to the Speaker, to the Auditor General and finally to the Supreme Court with 62 signatures behind him, and being met each time with silence.
Johan Galtung once told Victor Ivan what Sri Lanka would become. Thirty years on the column takes that forecast as its starting point and argues the Parliament must be rescued before the country can be.
With every institution of the state failed, Victor Ivan asks who is left. He measures Champika Ranawaka against the standard and finds an educated man who is still, in his judgment, a tribal leader.
Answering the response to 'End of an era', Victor Ivan sets out the changes themselves — an itemised programme for rebuilding the state, from investigating the presidents to regulating the broadcasters.
Gotabaya is failing, Victor Ivan writes, but so is the state he inherited. The column ends on the case of Shani Abeysekera and what happens to a country when its courts stop administering justice.
Known as the cleverest operator in Sri Lankan politics, Ranil Wickremesinghe ended up caught in someone else's trap. Victor Ivan sets out what he thinks went wrong, and what it cost the country.
The state the British handed over in 1948 has finished collapsing, Victor Ivan writes. Elections now decide not only who governs but who gets to plunder — and the era that began at independence ends in 2020.
A school system built on memorising, and a country that has stopped being able to reason. Victor Ivan argues the damage runs from Grade 1 to the way Sri Lanka has understood the pandemic.
Not the voters but their leaders were the fools of 2015. Victor Ivan calls the good-governance years a betrayed revolution and traces the counter-revolution it made inevitable.
Victor Ivan reads the Gotabaya government as the logical product of the good-governance years that preceded it — the narrowed agenda, the black money, the commissions that never worked.
A court that approves the removal of the people's own instruments of sovereignty. Victor Ivan sets the Indian Supreme Court beside the Sri Lankan bench and returns to the years he spent fighting Sarath Nanda Silva.
The pandemic did not cause this. Victor Ivan takes the crisis apart into its four components — the social order, the riots, the political system and the economy — and gives the remedy for each in brief.
Everyone is watching the 20th Amendment; Victor Ivan is watching the whirlwind behind it, which he expects to destroy both the remaining democracy and the dictatorial ambitions at once.
Comprehending the puzzles of 19th and 20th Amendments
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Both amendments are pickpockets, Victor Ivan writes — one in democratic dress, one in a dictator's robe. What neither touches is the president's licence to treat public property as his own.
