Short-sightedness, where shall it end?
Minorities, the judiciary, and a cabinet Victor Ivan says cannot see past the next few months. He argues that with both parties failing, only public pressure is left.
Finding a way to free the nation
Written at a politician’s request, this is Victor Ivan’s programme in five numbered parts — nation building, the judiciary, the system of governance, empowering the public, and the country’s place between India and China.
Redeeming the country
With the military unable to turn the wheels either, Victor Ivan calls for a common platform across the parties — and, failing that, for the Opposition to build one itself.
Halting the use of chemical fertiliser
The overnight fertiliser ban. Victor Ivan sets the President’s organic dream against the history of paddy cultivation and the chemistry of soil, and warns of the harvest that will follow.
Dreaming of the presidency
Victor Ivan turns on the men already planning their presidential runs and asks how anyone can want the office without first proposing to abolish what it has done to the country.
The crisis of not having mature leaders
Six opposition leaders, all of them products of the old order. Victor Ivan asks what a mature leader would look like and why the post-independence period has produced so few.
Perfecting the failure
Anarchy, bankruptcy, a misread geopolitics and a Geneva resolution. Victor Ivan reads the failure of the state as something now being completed rather than merely risked.
The end of a journey and beginning of a new one
Anti-Muslim feeling, the forced cremations, and what Victor Ivan says the National Intelligence Service did. The column argues the old era has ended and asks what should be built in its place.
More about the ‘end of an era of extremism’
A sequel to the previous week’s column. Victor Ivan goes back to Turnour’s Mahavamsa, to Anagarika Dharmapala and to the growth of literacy to show where Sinhala-Buddhist racism got its history from.
The end of an era of extremism
From the Mahavamsa to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Victor Ivan follows one line of thought through Sri Lankan history and argues that the era it produced is now, at last, ending.