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Plunder of public property by rulers
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Victor Ivan sets out how the plunder of public property was built into the state: laws left unenforced after 1977, permits handed to relatives and cronies, and MPs unseated by the courts then reappointed by their leaders.
With the presidential election set for December, Victor Ivan argues that every major leader has an interest in keeping the country unstable until polling day — and that none of them will touch the reforms that matter.
The surface fire is out; the fire under the ashes is not. Victor Ivan compares Sri Lanka's failure to build a nation with Gandhi's approach in India, and asks why the necessary reforms are still being avoided.
Sri Lanka needs emergency surgery, not an election, Victor Ivan writes — and he is careful to say what he means by surgery, what diagnosis must come first, and what the next president will actually be able to do.
Every branch of the state has broken the Constitution, Victor Ivan argues — and he traces the habit from the disenfranchisement of the plantation Tamils under Soulbury to the amendments that followed 1977.
What the country needs now is not an election but structural change, Victor Ivan argues — and he describes trying, and failing, to get that point onto the agenda of a meeting of party leaders.
Victor Ivan looks at what the Easter attacks have done to the Muslim community and to the state's intelligence services, and asks whether a country that has swum in blood for three decades can escape the cycle.
The first column after the Easter Sunday bombings. Victor Ivan sets the attacks against a longer record of political murder and asks what kind of state failed to see them coming.
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles by Lasantha Wickrematunge's daughter opens Victor Ivan's account of the wounds left on Sri Lankan society by abductions, disappearances and unpunished political murder.
Nagananda Kodituwakku's 'autochthonous' constitution would let every incoming ruler write his own, Victor Ivan argues — a recipe for constitutional chaos dressed up as home-grown independence.
Neither the government nor the opposition, Victor Ivan argues, but a third option: he describes what the Punarudaya Movement has actually tried in villages and meeting halls, and what it learned.
The Supreme Court has barred a public-interest litigator and prospective presidential candidate from practising for three years. Victor Ivan weighs Nagananda Kodituwakku's record — and the record of those he fought.
Answering a published reply to his own column, Victor Ivan sets out what the record actually shows about the decline of the Raja Rata, the British period and the uses to which Sri Lankan history is put.
Victor Ivan begins with arrack and ends with ganja, tracing how liquor built schools and fortunes in colonial Ceylon and how prohibition-minded policy since has served neither health nor honesty.
A numbered case for taking constitution-making out of the hands of a Parliament that Victor Ivan judges incapable of passing an ordinary Act, let alone founding a state.
Microfinance, invented to lift the very poor, has become in Sri Lanka a machine for stripping them. Victor Ivan reports from Polonnaruwa and Vavuniya on rural women trapped by collateral-free loans they never used to earn.
Sri Lanka's independence movement, Victor Ivan argues, was never a movement for liberation — and the elite that inherited the state kept caste and ethnicity as instruments of politics rather than dismantling them.
Seventy-one years after independence, countries that were behind Sri Lanka have overtaken it. Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the colonial inheritance, the uses made of ancient history, and the poverty of the country's intellectual life.
The 19th Amendment stripped the president of executive power but left him elected as though he still held it. Victor Ivan calls the result a country without a working constitution — and warns against going to the polls before fixing it.
Understanding Sri Lanka through education and agriculture
Victor Ivan
Daily FT
Rote learning from Grade 1 to Advanced Level; paddy land worked at a loss; wild animals destroying two-fifths of the crop. Victor Ivan uses education and agriculture to show how far the country's thinking has fallen behind.
