පළාත් සභා මැතිවරණය ගැන
As the first Northern Provincial Council election approaches alongside polls in the North Western and Central provinces, Ivan warns the government not to repeat the blunder of the 1981 Jaffna District Development Council election, when its all-out bid to win led to violence, the burning of the Jaffna library and, with the 1982 referendum, the road to Black July and two insurrections. He expects the government to win in the South but with eroding support, as debt-funded white elephants, a squeezed economy, lost GSP+ and a rotting system shed flesh like a decaying body.
විග්නේශ්වරන් මුවහමක් කරගැනීම
Answering Sinhala nationalist attacks on C.V. Wigneswaran, the TNA’s Northern chief ministerial candidate, as a new Anton Balasingham, Ivan argues that the dream of Eelam died with the LTTE. The TNA’s surviving leaders were hostages of Prabhakaran, not his followers, and signalled goodwill that the victors ignored. Wigneswaran — a retired Supreme Court judge who refused to bow to Sarath N. Silva, never an LTTE sympathiser, with children married to Sinhalese — should be welcomed. As Europe learned after the Thirty Years’ War, racial and religious extremism is losing its hold in Sri Lanka too.
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.
A Separate Tamil Nation:- Prabhakaran Has Got It Wrong.
Ivan argues that the separate-state goal adopted at the Vaddukoddai conference was imprudent and has brought the Tamil people mostly loss: India’s opposition, a homeland claim covering a third of the island, rival Tamil groups driven to the army as traitors, and a population now largely living outside the North and East. A movement that cannot turn back from a wrong path, he writes, cannot succeed.
ප්රචණ්ඩ අරගලයේ දුෂ්ට චක්රය
Writing in the first person, Ivan defends a view that angered Tamil intellectuals at a seminar: that the LTTE’s demand for absolute power should be met but confined to Tamil areas. He argues that every violent movement ends by devouring its own dissenters, citing Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky and Bukharin, the JVP’s killing of former comrades and the LTTE’s murder of Amirthalingam and Neelan Tiruchelvam, and advises dissident Tamils to stand aside while Prabhakaran is judged by the Tamil people.
නිදහසේ උභතෝකෝටිකය
On the 54th Independence Day, Ivan laments that freedom won without struggle left Sri Lanka without the attitudes or institutions to hold its communities together. Contrasting its record with Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and India, he cites negative growth, 15 per cent inflation, war costs and some 100,000 deaths, and argues that no leader since 1948, Sinhala or Tamil, has won the respect of all communities.