පාර්ලිමේන්තු මැතිවරණයෙන් පසු
With the opposition’s enthusiasm spent and its forces fighting the parliamentary election separately, Ivan expects the government to take 130 to 135 seats. He argues this is the historic moment for constitutional reform, and that it will only command respect if the opposition is brought in rather than bypassed by buying UNP members across. His programme: a mixed German-style electoral system, internal democracy in parties, publication of asset declarations on a website for continuous public scrutiny, the information act Milinda Moragoda has proposed, and opening parliamentary committees to the press. On devolution he proposes abandoning the province as the universal unit — keeping it only for the North, where the Tamil majority is overwhelming, and using the district everywhere else, with village councils on the Indian panchayat model beneath. He notes the President won 58 votes in every hundred and his opponent 40, and that reform must include the 40.
අශීලාචාර තැනක තිබෙන්නේ දේශපාලනය පමණක්ද?
A satirical column by Vimalanath Weeraratne about Ivan’s role in securing the Lanka editor’s release provoked a crisis at Ravaya: Ivan announced he would stop writing for the paper, and Janaranjana offered to resign as acting head of the editorial board before the matter was settled. Ivan defends his interventions with the President — for the Lanka editor, for Parameshwari, for a detained astrologer — and denies rumours that his son was sent abroad at state expense. He then turns on his own profession, arguing journalists are as disreputable as politicians: the fabricated story of Premadasa bathing in milk drew condemnation for the attack on the printing press but none for the reporting that provoked it, and foreign-registered websites now let anyone publish gutter journalism beyond reach of the law. He closes with his own inquiries into Prageeth Eknaligoda’s disappearance.
ආපසු හැරී බැලීමක් සමග ඉදිරිය දැකීමක්
Ivan sets out his own positions and why they left him isolated. He held that the Tamil rebellion was inseparable from Tamil grievances and had to be settled by negotiation — until it became clear the LTTE would accept nothing short of a separate state or confederation, at which point he supported defeating it militarily. He backed the war publicly and predicted the LTTE’s defeat while most of Ravaya’s own writers argued it could not be won. On the killing and beating of journalists he told colleagues the blame could not be laid wholly on a government unable to move against its army commander mid-war, and was angrily rejected by Sunanda Deshapriya. He records that this was the third insurrection he supported suppressing, including the 1971 rising he took part in himself. At the presidential election his loyalty was to Rajapaksa, whose remaining task he defines as remaking the state and political system.
ජයග්රහණයේ වටිනාකම බොඳ කරගැනීම
Fonseka’s arrest, whatever the grounds, dulls the shine of Rajapaksa’s victory and can be read as a move to head off an election petition. Ivan sets out the opposition’s crisis at that moment: Fonseka wanted to keep the swan symbol and the leadership that came with it, believing he had lifted the UNP’s base from two million votes to 4.1 million, while Wickremesinghe insisted on the elephant. Privately, Ivan writes, Wickremesinghe was relieved by the scale of the defeat — a narrow loss would have made Fonseka unchallengeable — and on the day of the arrest sent word through Mangala Samaraweera offering nomination under the elephant. The JVP is in the deeper crisis, having first approached Sarath Nanda Silva before settling on Fonseka, and may now win no seats at all. Ivan judges them the most remarkable political movement in the country, undone by an inability to revise an old doctrine for a changed world.
මැතිවරණ ප්රතිඵලය ගැන විවාදය
Opposition leaders claim the declared result was manufactured by the computer unit at the Elections Secretariat rather than summed from the counting centres. Ivan sets out how counting actually works — three stages, roughly eighty officers per centre, party agents present throughout, signed reports in six copies with one posted on the hall noticeboard and one handed to each candidate’s agent, results phoned to headquarters and confirmed back by the Commissioner before being faxed in writing. Any discrepancy between the centre reports and the official figure could be proved in hours, not months. He then checks: UNP organisers in Kesbewa, Moratuwa, Mawanella, Matara and Yatinuwara all report their centre documents matching the declared result, and Sajith Premadasa says the same of Hambantota. Kabir Hashim put a ten-rupee note in every ballot box in Mawanella and found them all at the count. Rather than trying to falsify the public’s genuine preference, Ivan argues, the opposition should ask why it existed.
භූමිය පමණක් නොව ජනතාවද එක්සේසත් කළ යුතුය
Had the margin been three thousand votes rather than a landslide, Ivan argues, supporters of the two camps would have turned on each other and the country would have run with blood. He traces how every Elections Commissioner has worked under duress: Jayasekera resigned after the 1981 Jaffna district council poll was taken over by the Defence Secretary, Chandananda de Silva could not publish his referendum report for five years, and in 2001 Chandrika Kumaratunga tried to arrest the Commissioner on Sarath Nanda Silva’s advice. The raid on Fonseka’s hotel after the result dulled the victory’s lustre. Ivan closes with eleven questions any constitutional reform must answer — on ethnic identity, rule of law, limits on presidential power, corruption, money in elections, party democracy and access to justice — and warns against repeating 1972 and 1977, when a governing party wrote a constitution alone.
ජයග්රහණය හා ඉදිරි ගමන
Rajapaksa’s re-election was large but its limits are visible. Ivan contrasts Wickremesinghe’s acceptance of defeat in 2005, decided by 180,786 votes, with Fonseka’s refusal to concede without explaining why the result is dishonest — a soldier new to politics who misread his crowds and campaigned believing defeat impossible. Both sides broke the law: the government used state media and resources as every government has since 1977, while the opposition used overseas websites and an FM station to spread false reports that the President had fled to India and the Elections Commissioner was under house arrest. The alliance behind Fonseka was held together by nothing but hostility to Rajapaksa, and included men who had accused him of Lasantha Wickrematunge’s murder. The anti-Rajapaksa revolt was largely urban, and the victory drew almost no Tamil, up-country Tamil or Muslim support. Infrastructure spending in the north and east has not answered the political question beneath it.
විය යුත්තේ කුමක්ද?
Two days before the poll, Ivan states plainly that he does not want Fonseka to win — not because Rajapaksa’s administration deserves protection, but because a change driven by hatred rather than a vision would leave the country in disorder, and anarchy is worse than bad government. Defeat would not finish Fonseka: he would become opposition leader and could acquire the political schooling he lacks, having entered politics straight from the battlefield and now flying on wings borrowed from two other parties. Ivan argues the opposition’s deeper failure is squandering parliament’s committee system, where members sign the attendance sheet for the allowance and leave, breaking quorum and sending summoned officials home with their files unopened. He sets out what Rajapaksa must change: shed the relatives beyond Chamal, Gotabaya and Basil, build an anti-corruption commission on the Hong Kong model, and stop overriding the independent commissions.