Added to the pandemic, a constitutional crisis
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.
Parliamentary Election and anarchy
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.
Anarchy and the Judiciary
The new government wants the corruption cases withdrawn and the courts will not oblige.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.
The reality of the system
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
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.
Understanding the puzzles of history
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.
Decline of the Judiciary
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.
Degeneration of Parliament exposed
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.
Foundations of incivility
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.
Nudity exposed
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.