ඉතිහාසය නැවත සලකා බැලීමක්
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s institutions are collapsing without anything new taking their place: the UNP and SLFP are historically spent, having built and then gorged on a predatory executive presidency, and the country runs like a bolting horse. To read the present he turns to the past, rejecting the anti-imperial myth that colonialism ruined a prosperous island. The Colebrooke–Cameron reforms freed people from caste service and built a unified modern state; the failure to unite the nation and democratise society belongs to Sri Lanka’s own leaders.
බොරුව හා රැවටිල්ල ජාතික ලක්ෂණයක්ද?
Ivan asks whether deceit is a national habit, and finds it at every turn of modern history: D.S. Senanayake’s staged ‘farmers’ and the governor-generalship promised to Lord Soulbury, the 1962 ‘gin-and-tonic’ coup plot, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only opportunism, and John D’Oyly’s bloodless capture of Kandy in 1815, whose native helpers’ descendants became the independence elite. Drawing on Marshall Singer, Henpitagedara Gnanaseeha and Robert Knox, he argues that leaders and people have deceived each other on language and religion until the country fell into an abyss.
පාසල් අධ්යාපනයේදී අදක්ෂ දරුවන් ගැන
Ivan tells parents that a child who fails at school is not a failure. Fewer than five in a hundred who enter school reach university, and academic success is only one ladder upward: D.S. Senanayake, the least able of three brothers, became the first Prime Minister, and Martin Wickramasinghe, schooled to the seventh grade, became the country’s greatest man of letters. He urges parents to find the talent a child has and steer it into good vocational training, ideally in English so the way abroad stays open.
වරද කාගේද?
Ivan traces Sri Lanka’s three constitutions to argue that each was made by whichever party held the numbers, without the consensus a constitution demands. The Soulbury order, flawed but workable, let governments fall; Colvin R. de Silva’s 1972 constitution stripped away its safeguards and ignored the Tamil language question; J.R. Jayewardene’s 1978 system put all power in one unaccountable man. Yet the fault, he concludes, is not J.R.’s alone but a society given independence as a gift, democratic on the surface and feudal at the core.
ලේ තැවරුණු නිදහසේ හැටපස් වසර
On the 65th anniversary of independence, Ivan argues that Sri Lanka never met the two conditions a nation-state needed: a united nation and a democratic political society. Contrasting India’s mass freedom struggle and three-year constituent assembly with Ceylon’s bloodless, deferential transfer of power, he recalls caste and religion used against A.E. Goonesinha, E.W. Perera and Arunachalam, and Oliver Goonetilleke’s manipulation of the Soulbury Commission. Each constitution since, culminating in the executive presidency, has deepened the distortion.
රිසානා ඛේදවාචකය හා තරුණ පරපුරේ සිහිනය
Ivan argues that the execution of Rizana Nafeek exposes a rotten state as much as a harsh foreign court: it was Sri Lankan institutions that turned a child into an adult on her birth certificate, passport and medical papers. Migrant workers’ remittances are now the economy’s largest earner, yet housemaids are treated worse than beggars. He urges the state to replace the export of housemaids with trained craftsmen, making vocational training compulsory for school leavers and and sending them abroad, as graduates of the German technical institute at Ratmalana already go.
ආණ්ඩුවේ ඉදිරි දැක්ම හා කාර්ය සාධනය
Ivan assesses the Rajapaksa government from its narrow 2005 victory to its unrivalled post-war dominance, crediting the defeat of the LTTE and real progress in resettlement and rehabilitation. He argues that the UNP’s opposition to the war destroyed its own base, that the government has given Tamils everything except their dignity, and that leaning towards China while breaking promises to India ignores the island’s geopolitical position. Mahinda Rajapaksa, he concludes, dreams like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir or J.R. Jayewardene of development without democracy.
ජේ.ආර්.ගෙන් ඉගෙන ගැනීම
Ivan argues that the government won the battle over the Chief Justice at a ruinous cost, leaving constitutional interpretation and the writ jurisdiction hollow. He faults the judges and lawyers for fighting like a political party, recalls the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his own challenge to Sarath N. Silva’s appointment, and draws a close parallel between Mahinda Rajapaksa’s removal of Shirani Bandaranayake and J.R. Jayewardene’s stripping of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s civic rights, warning that Jayewardene’s drive for unchangeable power ended in Black July, two insurrections and his own humiliation.
නීතියක් නැති රටකට!
With the impeachment of the Chief Justice reaching its climax, the paper sets aside ordinary reporting to list, in twelve numbered points, the consequences of pressing ahead in defiance of rulings by the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal. It rejects the government’s comparisons with the Philippines and Westminster, warns that a new Chief Justice installed over a lawfully protected one would bring repression and chaos into the courts, and predicts damage as grave as the 1982 referendum and Black July.
අවිචාරය, උද්ධච්චකම හා අශීලාචාරත්වය
Ivan argues that by ignoring the judgments of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal in the impeachment of the Chief Justice, the government has done what no previous government dared, destroying both the courts’ legitimacy and its own. He traces the Supreme Court’s power to interpret the constitution and the ancient reach of the writ jurisdiction, recalls the Bracegirdle case under colonial rule and Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s certiorari against J.R. Jayewardene’s commission, and warns, with Musharraf’s Pakistan as the precedent, that two rival Chief Justices could now follow.