Dive into an archive of over 5,000+ published articles…
Archives: Articles
What may happen?
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
The winner has the cake and it is not edible. Victor Ivan describes a government that has taken enormous power at exactly the moment power stops being worth having.
Everyone is defending the 19th Amendment against the 20th. Victor Ivan argues the country was already in the dark under the 19th, and that those who cannot see that will not understand what the 20th does.
A throne speech that never mentions the crisis. Victor Ivan sets the President's words against the World Bank's forecasts, the collapse of state revenue and the half-million jobs about to be lost in the Gulf.
A two-thirds majority and no idea what to do with it. Victor Ivan reads the 2020 landslide as a dilemma for the winners — and reserves his sharpest analysis for what became of the UNP and the JVP.
Whatever the election returns, Victor Ivan expects deadlock — a shrinking economy, half a million jobs lost abroad, and three underlying failures that no majority can vote away.
India counts the criminal cases against its MPs; Sri Lanka does not count at all. Victor Ivan sets the two countries' records side by side and asks why no one here has thought the question worth asking.
How Parliament was bought: Victor Ivan traces the estates, contracts and licences J.R. Jayewardene handed his MPs, and asks whether the new House will break the silence its predecessors kept.
Two centres of power inside one ruling family, an election held under the shadow of a second COVID wave, and a Supreme Court that let MPs cross the floor without losing their seats.
What the three branches of the state are supposed to do, and what Sri Lanka's actually do. Victor Ivan's answer is to hand the constitution to the people, with citizens' initiatives and referendums built into it.
The promised remedy: Victor Ivan's blueprint for rebuilding the state — a judiciary with the power of judicial review, a reformed legislature and executive, and an end to the plunder of public property.
Whoever wins in August, the country reaches a crossroads. Victor Ivan sets out participatory constitution-making as practised elsewhere and argues Sri Lanka must cut the cord to be born again.
Mangala Samaraweera walks away from traditional politics, and Victor Ivan reads the decision as the first crack of light — an established figure joining the argument for system change.
A primer on the three pillars — what the legislature, the executive and the judiciary are each for, what judicial review means, and how far Sri Lanka's institutions have drifted from the description.
Answering readers who asked for a solution, Victor Ivan goes back to the core issues — the limits of the independence Sri Lanka was given, the disenfranchisements that followed, and the nation never built.
Seventy-two years in four phases, each worse than the last. Victor Ivan totals the debt against government revenue and argues the country has passed from the frying pan into the fire.
Asked why he proposed closing Ravaya, Victor Ivan answers with an account of what the paper was for — the battle against Sarath Nanda Silva, the criminal defamation law, and the case he took to the United Nations.
The voters believed they were electing a strongman who would rescue them. Victor Ivan describes a country sliding into a bottomless pit while neither its navigators nor its passengers can see what is ahead.
India and Sri Lanka took the democratic road together at independence. Victor Ivan asks whether the pandemic will let a nominal president govern as a real one, and whether the courts will stop it.
If Gotabaya Rajapaksa wanted the power to govern, Victor Ivan argues, he contested the wrong office — and the gap between the image built for him and the powers he actually holds is now deepening the crisis.
The pandemic is an accident, not a conspiracy. Victor Ivan argues it has merely accelerated a collapse already under way, and asks whether what is ending is a government or an era.
