රජිව් ගාන්ධි ලංකාවේ වීරයෙක්ද? ද්රෝහියෙක්ද?
After a brief tribute to the Elections Commissioner for requiring asset declarations with nominations, Ivan marks the Accord’s 26th anniversary by defending Rajiv Gandhi against the Sinhala view of him as a scheming invader. Drawing on J.N. Dixit, he recounts Rajiv’s insistence on signing amid riots, his calm after a sailor’s rifle-butt blow, his concessions to Prabhakaran and the IPKF operations that led to his assassination. The IPKF, he argues, saved the state from two simultaneous insurgencies until Premadasa armed the LTTE; Sri Lanka should honour Rajiv with a statue.
ඉන්දු-ලංකා ගිවිසුම ආපසු හැරී බැලීමක්
As the government retreats from diluting the Thirteenth Amendment before the Northern Provincial Council election, Ivan argues that the Indo-Lanka Accord is an international treaty that cannot be changed unilaterally — and that after the war India, as Shivshankar Menon told him, would have backed a better devolution scheme. Drawing on K.M. de Silva and J.N. Dixit, he corrects the popular belief that the Accord was forced on Sri Lanka by the 1987 airdrop: it grew from the 1985 Delhi Accord, and without the IPKF the state might not have survived two insurgencies.
නිල්වලා ගඟේ අයිතිය කිඹුලන්ට!
A column of shorter pieces. Ivan mocks a conservation policy that has handed the Nilwala River to man-eating crocodiles while villagers who kill them are prosecuted; asks again why people dying of kidney disease in Rajarata still have no filtered water; argues that the media, rather than simply rejecting the government’s code of ethics, should adopt codes binding owners as well as journalists; cautions, after Snowden, that states will police cyberspace because future wars will be fought there; and urges building expressways over double-tracked railways free of level crossings.
බිත්තරය සහ ගොළුබෙල්ලා
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is turning its back on a globalised world in which two million of its people already work abroad and foreign workers fill jobs at home. Rather than despise young people’s dream of emigrating, the state should equip them with vocational training and English to go legally; the nursing schools, still teaching a 1935 syllabus in Sinhala, are his case in point. Those abroad must learn to live with other faiths and foods — the man who retches at snails peeled like eggs will not last — and Sri Lanka’s image, damaged by triumphalism, follows them.
අරාජිකත්වයේ අභියෝගය
Ivan reads the weeks since Vesak as signs of a country drifting into anarchy: rotten institutions are collapsing with nothing to replace them. A monk’s staged self-immolation, sold to television by a journalist as an exclusive; a Deputy Inspector General, Vass Gunawardena, exposed as a kidnapper and contract killer; the fusion of politicians and the criminals who guarded them during the insurgencies; and a push to scrap the Thirteenth Amendment unilaterally. He traces Indo-Lankan hostility to the UNP’s 1977 insults to Indira Gandhi and warns that breaking the Accord would complete the slide.
හරක් මස් වාදය
After a monk set himself alight at the Temple of the Tooth on Vesak in protest at cattle slaughter, Ivan takes the anti-beef campaign apart on its own terms. A dairy industry, which the same patriots demand, cannot survive if spent cows cannot be sold for meat, as India’s Muslim market makes possible; vegetarianism without planning deprives people of complete protein; and ancient Sinhala Buddhist kings hunted and ate game. Beneath it, he argues, lies Dharmapala’s anti-Muslim racism — and a quarrel with a world Muslim community twenty times the size of the Tamils would be ruinous.
මැරෙන්නට ඉඩ හැර බලා සිටීම
The chronic kidney disease killing people in the former border villages of the North Central Province draws less attention than stray dogs or cattle bound for slaughter, the paper says. At the very least the government should supply water through heavy-metal filters — not a Rs 35 million tank at Padaviya fed from the same groundwater doctors warn against — and, if no quick cure is found, resettle people on safer land. A society that lets them die, it concludes, is not a human one.
රාවය ප්රතිසංවිධාන
Ivan replies to Mahesh Hapugoda, who read his wish to make Ravaya a paper for readers’ wives and children as a slide into Nihal Peiris-style entertainment. He rejects both that reading and its view of women, and offers as proof a piece written for parents and daughters: on whether one needs a hero. His own is Gandhi, with Socrates second; he recalls his lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna, who modelled himself on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, contrasts J.R. Jayewardene’s Napoleon, and warns through Nietzsche, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran against hero worship.
මගේ සිහිනය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to readers’ reactions to his plan to reorganise Ravaya, Ivan explains his habit of seeing things unconventionally, as Gandhi and Mandela did, and sets his plan against his forecast that Sri Lanka is heading for anarchy. After Prabhakaran’s defeat the political system stood exposed; Mahinda Rajapaksa, the only leader left, failed to rebuild the state, and parties on both sides are historically spent. With a monk’s self-immolation over cattle slaughter and the row over the Thirteenth Amendment as signs, he argues Ravaya must be strengthened to guide readers through the coming collapse.
කියවීම හා ප්රශ්න කිරීම
A visit to Prem Dissanayake’s bookshop leads Ivan to a Sinhala translation of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities’ by Liyanage Amarakeerthi. He laments a culture in which teachers, journalists and politicians rarely read — no Sri Lankan leader since D.S. Senanayake has written a serious book, unlike India’s — and in which publishers favour novels over ideas. Drawing on Nussbaum’s chapter on Socratic pedagogy, he argues that Sri Lanka treats the questioner as a traitor and must learn to read, argue and respect dissent.