මගේ සිහිනය
Answering websites that claimed the Rajapaksa government was buying Ravaya through Milinda Moragoda and paying Ivan a bribe, Ivan sets out Ravaya’s 27-year record of refusing favours: turning down Chandrika Kumaratunga’s offer of the Lake House chairmanship, free newsprint from the anti-Premadasa impeachment camp, and Harry Jayawardena’s private money. He describes his dream for Ravaya before he retires — staff as shareholders, new presses, a stronger paper and a web presence — and the conditions under which Moragoda would buy only a 40 per cent minority stake, inviting alternatives.
අධිවේග මාර්ග හා දැක්මේ තිබෙන පුංචිකම
Recalling Lalith Athulathmudali’s dream of an expressway joining Hambantota and Jaffna through Colombo, Ivan contrasts the British road and rail network, the best in South Asia at independence, with the neglect that followed, as J.R. Jayewardene poured money into an airline against Lee Kuan Yew’s advice. The Southern Expressway is fast, he says, but serves the car-owning rich; built over a modernised double-track railway it would have needed no land acquisition and served the poor too. On his reckoning it will take two centuries to repay.
විදුලි මාෆියාව ඇත්තක්ද?
Weighing the arguments of Tilak Siyambalapitiya, Udaya Gammanpila, Harsha de Silva, Champika Ranawaka and the CEB chairman on the 2013 power tariff increase, the article argues that the root problem is Sri Lanka’s dependence on oil-fired private power costing Rs 40–45 a unit against Rs 1.50 for hydro. It asks who blocked the Norochcholai coal plant in 2002 so that oil plants could be tendered instead, why the Chinese plant keeps breaking down, and why the one-sided private power contracts exposed by the Central Bank in 2007 remain secret.
නව ව්යවස්ථාව ගැන
Continuing his response to the draft Nineteenth Amendment, Ivan sets out how a new constitution should be made: first agree the principles with the public, as South Africa and India did, then draft. He argues it must define a Sri Lankan nation of equal peoples and outlaw caste discrimination; return to a reformed parliamentary system with a mixed electoral system, a Senate and an Indian-style election commission; devolve power to village and district councils; bind governments to national policy frameworks, above all a foreign policy that respects India; and make the state secular.
19 වැනි සංශෝධන කෙටුම්පත ගැන
Ivan welcomes the campaign by Maduluwawe Sobitha’s National Movement for a Just Society to abolish the executive presidency, but argues its draft Nineteenth Amendment is a concept paper with a narrow vision. Every Sri Lankan constitution, and Chandrika Kumaratunga’s 2000 draft, was made by cunning or majority power rather than on the sovereignty of the people, as India and South Africa did. The draft ignores the unresolved question of who belongs to the nation, copies the flawed Constitutional Council of the Seventeenth Amendment, and keeps a simple-majority impeachment of judges.
ජාතියේ හා ආගමේ නාමයෙන් රට රැගෙන යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
Ivan warns that the anti-Muslim campaign now being led by groups of monks mirrors the climate before 1915, 1958 and 1983. He retells the 1915 Sinhala–Muslim riots, rooted in Dharmapala’s revival and Sinhala traders’ envy of Muslim commerce, and traces the Muslims’ long history in the island. Such a riot now, he argues, would be ruinous, and its premise betrays Buddhism itself: from the Kalama Sutta and the parable of the raft to Asoka’s edicts and Walpola Rahula, the Buddha’s teaching is one of free inquiry and tolerance.
අධිකරණය හා නීතිඥයන්
When the Bar Association installed Upul Jayasuriya as president with the ousted Shirani Bandaranayake in the chair rather than Chief Justice Mohan Peiris, it signalled that lawyers still did not accept the new Chief Justice. Ivan welcomes the gesture but argues that judicial independence died with the executive presidency, not the impeachment, and that bench and bar share the blame: the referendum judgment, the Eighteenth Amendment, the Lenin Ratnayake scandal and a rapist High Court judge’s reinstatement show a profession unable to discipline itself. He sets out the English model of regulation.
අන්තෝ ජටා බහි ජටා
Ivan asks why more than a hundred thousand deaths in two insurrections have left so little mark on Sri Lankan thought and literature, recalling conversations with Simon Navagattegama and Ediriweera Sarachchandra and a sharp exchange with Sugathapala de Silva. He argues that caste, not only race and class, drove both rebellions: Wijeweera and Prabhakaran came from parallel non-dominant castes and drew their foot soldiers from oppressed ones. Only Premadasa grasped this, and the chance to rebuild society after the LTTE’s defeat has been squandered.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (2)
Ivan argues that British rule transformed Ceylon’s economy and state but left its thinking feudal. Europe’s Renaissance and liberal philosophers — Copernicus to Locke and Mill — remade how people thought as well as how they lived; India’s Congress, under Gandhi and Nehru, used the freedom struggle itself as a revolution in thought against caste and communalism. Ceylon, handed independence on a tray, had only Buddhist and Hindu revivals that fought Christian dominance but, trapped by caste and unlike Ram Mohan Roy’s, never turned their criticism inward.