Thwarting the people’s will can be disastrous
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 the UNP cannot be stopped.
Doing the best thing for the worst reasons
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 member individually indispensable and produced constant in-fighting over portfolios. Examining vote shares across Galle, Matara and Hambantota, Ivan shows the PA-DUNF combination outpolled the UNP by 61,106 votes yet lost the bonus seats to it, and contends that Gamini Dissanayake’s defection will bring the Government little benefit in a province that has not given the UNP half the vote since 1982.
JVP legacy that of Pol Pot and Prabhakaran
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 sees no sign of repentance.
The best laid plans of government men …
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 committed election offences in Jaffna in 1981. He explains why he kept the account back for two years.
Caste oppression and youth unrest
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 areas where oppressed castes — Wahumpura, Bathgama, Nekathi — were dense, a pattern the Presidential Commission on Youth Unrest also recorded. These groups entered the capitalist economy late, gained education late, and remain under-represented in Parliament. Ivan extends the analysis to the Tamil militancy, reading it as a struggle against Vellala domination as much as for national freedom, and suggests that both movements refuse to disarm because returning to democratic politics would mean returning to high-caste dominance. A Ravaya reader survey finding the JVP still esteemed by a tenth of Sinhala society leads him to warn of room for a third uprising.
ද්රවිඩ ජනයා – ලංකාවේ වමට අභියෝගයක්!
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. He tests their consistency against Bangladesh: the Awami League was no Marxist movement, but the Left correctly backed its independence struggle, measuring the case by whether the people were oppressed rather than by the class character of their leadership. Why, he asks, does that yardstick stop at Jaffna? Rejecting the equation of oppressor and oppressed nationalism — one cannot equate the Black Panthers with the Klan — Ivan argues that the Left’s opportunist alliance with Sinhala-Buddhist chauvinism is what makes it unable to support a just demand, and that only by joining the struggle rather than lecturing it from outside can Marxists rebuild the broken Sinhala-Tamil unity.
හිරගෙදර කතන්දරය
Eighteen months after his first piece on prisons, Ivan returns to the subject in far greater detail. He calls Sri Lanka’s prisons a kingdom for corrupt officers, a heaven for a few rich inmates and a hell for the poor majority. Prisoners receive less than half their ration, cooked without spices. Poor inmates sell their meals for cigarettes and wear filthy, reused clothing, while rich ones buy better food, poplin uniforms, beds, and milk and eggs prescribed by complicit doctors. He describes the ritual beating every new prisoner gets at the gate, and the “poriyal”, in which thirty or forty guards beat a man to the edge of death. He cites a Judicial Medical Officer, Chandra Amarasekara, who testified that one such killing was the worst beating he had ever seen. Guards run gambling dens and liquor and drug trades, and for a bribe they arrange sexual access to young prisoners. Ivan sets out five reforms: an adequate diet, which he says April insurgent prisoners proved possible when they ran some prison kitchens; clean clothing laundered in Welikada’s own machines; higher wages for prisoners; relief from overcrowding and water shortages; and a civilian inspection committee. He calls first for an independent commission into actual prison conditions.
ගොවි ණය ප්රශ්නය විසඳීමට අදහසක්
Ivan takes up the government’s plan to overhaul agricultural credit after farmers failed to repay 73 percent of the loans issued for the last Maha season. He draws on a 1972 Central Bank sample survey and the 1969–70 socio-economic survey. Low income, he argues, is the root of the defaults, and nearly half of rural families live below a “dark line” of Rs. 200 a month. Most of the families trapped there are ande sharecroppers: in Hambantota, 83 percent of tenant borrowers defaulted, against 33 percent of owner-cultivators. In Kurunegala it cost a tenant Rs. 27.68 to produce a bushel of paddy that the state bought for Rs. 18, because rent swallowed so much of the harvest. Cutting off their credit would collapse output on 43 percent of paddy land, while continuing to lend means permanent losses. He concludes that freeing tenants from rent by transferring their land to them would cost the state far less than the defaults, and that the cost could be recovered.
වැඩිපුර වී ලබාගන්නට නව උපාය මාර්ගයක්
Ivan frames the 1974 food-production drive as a front in a wider struggle between the “progressive” United Front government and reactionary forces he describes as turning fascist. He notes that the Maha harvest beat its target by 14 percent, yet the Paddy Marketing Board bought only half its quota, while most of the crop went to black-market traders. Raising the guaranteed price four times in seventeen months has failed: traders outbid the state each time, and every increase pushes up the price of the urban workers’ rice ration. Returning to the proposal in his May article, he argues that the state should transfer all tenanted paddy land to its cultivators. Owners would be compensated, and tenants would repay the cost in paddy delivered to the Board instead of rent to landlords. That would bring the quarter of the national harvest now lost to rent into public hands, raise yields, settle long-running tenancy disputes, and turn sharecroppers into what he calls an anti-fascist rural force.
හිරගෙදර ‘පෝරියල්’ නවතීද?
Writing as a prisoner under a pseudonym, Ivan gives an insider’s account of life in Sri Lanka’s prisons, which he says still run on colonial lines. He describes guards who use the baton as a cure-all, and the “poriyal”, a collective beating that has killed some prisoners. He shows how more than half the food ration meant for inmates ends up with officers, their families and the prison canteen. He also exposes a contraband trade in cigarettes, arrack and ganja run through guards’ oversized pockets, and an extortion racket in which officers collect money from prisoners’ homes and keep half. Ivan welcomes the new Commissioner of Prisons and his policy of managing prisoners psychologically rather than by force. He urges an independent panel with free access to prisoners, the restoration of prison education suspended after April 1971, and reform of a colonial system that holds everyone from debtors to “politically misguided ultra-left youth”.