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Thwarting the people’s will can be disastrous
Victor Ivan
Counterpoint
On the eve of the August 1994 parliamentary election, Ivan warns of a plan to use the President's power over the choice of Prime Minister to name Sirimavo Bandaranaike rather than Chandrika Kumaratunga and split the People's Alliance. He calls on Mrs Bandaranaike to speak, and predicts the tide against
Victor Ivan analyses the 1993 Southern Provincial Council election, called after the Government's attempt to unseat Chief Minister Amarasiri Dodangoda and install M.S. Amarasiri collapsed halfway. He argues the Government has inadvertently done the Opposition a favour: the People's Alliance had been clinging to a one-vote majority that made every
Answering JVP writers who now praise the party's programme and compare its 1989 hartal to that of 1953, Ivan argues the 1989 hartal was enforced by killing, likens the JVP's record to Pol Pot and Prabhakaran, and dismisses its manifesto as unworkable. He allows that a party can reform, but
Ten years after Black July, Ivan sets out the official toll of the 1983 riots and records what K. Ganeshalingam, UNP Treasurer and Cyril Mathew's friend, told him one evening: that the government's main leaders planned the violence to turn rising Sinhala anger away from themselves, and that UNP men
Writing on the twenty-second anniversary of the 1971 rebellion, Victor Ivan argues that caste oppression has been an underrated driver of youth revolt in both the south and the north. Drawing on Gananath Obeyesekera, Janice Jiggins and Bryce Ryan's Caste in Modern Ceylon, he shows that JVP strength concentrated in
Writing in 1979, Victor Ivan challenges Sri Lanka's Marxists — reformist and radical alike — over their deliberate silence on the Tamil national struggle in the north. They mount poster campaigns and solidarity rallies for oppressed nations abroad, he observes, yet stand mute before a struggle on their own doorstep.
