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Added to the pandemic, a constitutional crisis
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Parliament dissolved, an election impossible, and the president's spending power expiring on 30 April. Victor Ivan sets out the constitutional deadlock the pandemic created, alongside the communal poison it released.
Behind the carnival of a parliamentary election, Victor Ivan sees anarchy: soldiers doing police work, a constitution honoured informally, and a central bank robbed with no one held to account.
The new government wants the corruption cases withdrawn and the courts will not oblige. Victor Ivan reads the resulting cold war as the one place in the state where something is still being defended.
Duty-free permits, super-grade vehicles and an assets law with two open loopholes. Victor Ivan uses the perks of Parliament to show how the system really works — including his own part in prising the declarations open.
Withering of expectations and prospects of new ones
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
The younger brother is president, the elder is prime minister, and the powers do not sit where the voters think they do. Victor Ivan argues that changing the occupants will not change the system.
Victor Ivan goes back to the chronicles: how ethnic groups and religions formed on the island, what the South Indian invasions actually did, and how monks writing history shaped the way Sri Lankans think now.
Sri Lanka could have been saved by its courts. Victor Ivan sets the Indian Supreme Court's record beside the Sri Lankan bench and finds a judiciary as backward as the legislature it was meant to check.
From the old house at Galle Face to the complex at Kotte: Victor Ivan argues that a Parliament whose members trade with the government they audit has forfeited its own legality.
Why does a country tolerate constitutional violation after constitutional violation without protest? Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the intellectual poverty of the Left, the language question and the habit of judicial silence.
The Ramanayake tapes let Victor Ivan return to a case he pursued for years — a magistrate, an attorney general and a chief justice — and to what he says the episode did to the Sri Lankan judiciary.
Thirteen thousand recorded phone calls seized from an MP's house, and a government that wants the national anthem sung only in Sinhala. Victor Ivan reads both as tests of how civil the nation is.
Sri Lanka's debt, its import bill for dhal, chillies and milk, its fuel and vehicle costs — Victor Ivan argues the disaster is also the opening, if the public rather than the parties takes the lead.
Each government jails the last one's ministers and is jailed in turn. Victor Ivan calls it a tribal inheritance — a cycle of revenge that has replaced accountability and now protects everyone from investigation.
A monk asks the diaspora for dollars to keep the government running. Victor Ivan sets the new president's inheritance against the Yahapalana years and against the murder of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Not the debt alone. Victor Ivan digs for the roots of the crisis in the subsidies handed out for votes, the language policy, the identity-card system and the corruption that has spread through every institution.
Whatever his history, Gotabaya Rajapaksa now governs those who voted against him too. Victor Ivan turns from the presidency to stray dogs, crop-raiding wildlife, milk and meat — and argues for an agrarian revolution.
North and east voted one way, the Sinhala south the other. Victor Ivan takes the ethnic arithmetic of the 2019 result as the unanswered question of Sri Lankan politics: how to make one nation out of three electorates.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa won without the minorities. Victor Ivan reads the result as a second 1956 — a Sinhala-Buddhist revival in new clothes — and asks what kind of leader the country has just demanded.
With a People's Constitution now in several manifestos, Victor Ivan sets out what the model actually requires: a constitutional assembly drawn from every sector of society, and an honest review of what went wrong before.
Every candidate has a manifesto and none has a vision. Victor Ivan reads the campaign against the religious revivals of the nineteenth century and the failure, ever since, to build one nation.
