Another aspect of the crisis
Corruption, not just monetary mismanagement, is what emptied the reserves. Victor Ivan follows the vehicle permits back to J.R. Jayewardene and the predatory system he built around them.
Was the last presidential election a fraud?
Nagananda Kodithuwakku’s petition asks whether Gotabaya Rajapaksa was qualified to stand at all. Victor Ivan follows the citizenship question and asks why neither rival candidate ever raised it.
Was there an invisible hand behind the Easter attack?
Cardinal Ranjith goes to the Pope and to Geneva, and Shani Abeysekera sits in a cell. Victor Ivan lays out what he calls the puzzle behind the Easter Sunday attack and asks who benefited from it.
Sri Lanka on the brink of anarchy
Written weeks before the fuel queues turned into protests. Victor Ivan traces the fertiliser theory back to the two men who sold it, and says the country will soon be declared bankrupt.
Prime cause of the crisis
On the 74th independence anniversary Victor Ivan finds the public discussion unusually advanced, then argues that Parliament itself is illegally constituted and points to the Jayewardene Centre as the founding example.
Crisis of Sri Lanka: Champika and Anura
Champika Ranawaka and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, judged side by side. Victor Ivan credits both where their proposals are sound and faults both for saying nothing about the judiciary or Parliament.
The rough sea, sinking ship and the captain
A novice captain took the helm in the worst weather at sea. Victor Ivan reads Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidency that way, then turns to Geiger and the curse laid on kings in the chronicles.
President Chandrika and former Chief Justice Shirani Bandaranayke
Chandrika Kumaratunga launches her memoir and Shirani Bandaranayake gives the keynote. Victor Ivan, who wrote a book about Chandrika, listens to the speech and sets the record against it.
The elephant, goat and the rope
Rohan Samarajiva answers back, so Victor Ivan sets out the case against independent commissions in detail, drawing on India and Hong Kong to show what an appointing body has to be before it can work.
Seeking a path to get out of the morass
A proposed way out of the trap: an interim constitution, a constituent assembly, and the observation — from Colvin R. de Silva — that removing even an insane president would take more than two years.