Playing with the crisis
Victor Ivan notes that he predicted bankruptcy three years earlier as a political analyst rather than an economist, then sets out what the import restrictions and the fertiliser ban will do next.
Changing the nation’s fate
Not a manifesto but a method: Victor Ivan sets out how a mass of citizens could file fundamental rights petitions together, and what a Centre of Public Movement built on that would be able to do.
Is Lanka insane?
A nation, Victor Ivan writes, can go mad the way a person can. The column diagnoses the intellectual paucity behind the debt crisis and sets out what an IMF programme would have to be built on.
Deceiving the Sinhala Buddhists
The utopian Sinhala-Buddhist state promised in 2019 and 2020 did not arrive. Victor Ivan argues that of everyone deceived by the racist project, the Sinhala Buddhists themselves were deceived most.
Constitutionality and Basil Rajapaksa
Basil Rajapaksa’s National List seat, examined against the Constitution and the international covenant Sri Lanka has already been found to have breached. Victor Ivan asks whether the law will simply be ignored.
More about the presidential system
Replies came in defending Champika Ranawaka, so Victor Ivan answers them. He calls Champika a genius who is simultaneously philosopher and exorcist, and asks what that contradiction cost the country.
The puzzles of Sri Lanka’s crisis
Two puzzles put to the leaders who want power: why keep the presidency, and why ban chemical fertiliser? Victor Ivan uses Champika Ranawaka’s answers to both as the test case.
The crisis and agriculture
What could be done for agriculture if the fertiliser ban were lifted: co-operative societies, the wild animal problem, dairy and beef, dhal and chillies, and paddy. A practical column, unusually free of politics.
Sri Lanka: Another cause for failure
Dharmapala and Marx, the Soulbury Constitution broken before the ink was dry, and the citizenship of the plantation workers. Victor Ivan traces the decline to the choices made at the moment of independence.
The absence of leaders: A crisis
2015 was the last chance, Victor Ivan writes, and it was spent dishonestly. The column goes back through independence, the 1978 constitution and revolution and counter-revolution to explain the vacuum now left.