Perfecting the failure
Gotabaya is failing, Victor Ivan writes, but so is the state he inherited. The column ends on the case of Shani Abeysekera and what happens to a country when its courts stop administering justice.
What went wrong with Ranil?
Known as the cleverest operator in Sri Lankan politics, Ranil Wickremesinghe ended up caught in someone else’s trap. Victor Ivan sets out what he thinks went wrong, and what it cost the country.
End of an era
The state the British handed over in 1948 has finished collapsing, Victor Ivan writes. Elections now decide not only who governs but who gets to plunder — and the era that began at independence ends in 2020.
Making the nation a bunch of morons
A school system built on memorising, and a country that has stopped being able to reason. Victor Ivan argues the damage runs from Grade 1 to the way Sri Lanka has understood the pandemic.
The revolution betrayed and the fate of Sri Lanka
Not the voters but their leaders were the fools of 2015. Victor Ivan calls the good-governance years a betrayed revolution and traces the counter-revolution it made inevitable.
2015, a dilemma; 2020, a flummox
Victor Ivan reads the Gotabaya government as the logical product of the good-governance years that preceded it — the narrowed agenda, the black money, the commissions that never worked.
True status of the Judiciary
A court that approves the removal of the people’s own instruments of sovereignty. Victor Ivan sets the Indian Supreme Court beside the Sri Lankan bench and returns to the years he spent fighting Sarath Nanda Silva.
Prime factors of the crisis
The pandemic did not cause this. Victor Ivan takes the crisis apart into its four components — the social order, the riots, the political system and the economy — and gives the remedy for each in brief.
Anarchy, dictatorship and the Constitution
Everyone is watching the 20th Amendment; Victor Ivan is watching the whirlwind behind it, which he expects to destroy both the remaining democracy and the dictatorial ambitions at once.
Comprehending the puzzles of 19th and 20th Amendments
Both amendments are pickpockets, Victor Ivan writes — one in democratic dress, one in a dictator’s robe. What neither touches is the president’s licence to treat public property as his own.