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 crisis and Anura Kumara
Anura Kumara Dissanayake says the JVP is ready to lead. Victor Ivan, who knows the party’s history from the inside, weighs that claim against what its violence did to the country.
Election, the transformative opportunity
Every candidate has a manifesto and none has a vision. Victor Ivan reads the campaign against the religious revivals of the nineteenth century and the failure, ever since, to build one nation.
The presidency and the dilemma of the Presidential Election
J.R. Jayewardene built the presidency to make himself a king; the 19th Amendment hollowed it out but left the crown on. Victor Ivan reads the 2019 field — Gotabaya, the UNP’s impasse, the JVP — against that comedy.
පෙරටුගාමී පක්ෂයේ ස්වයං විවේචනය
Amid the decay of every party, Ivan reviews the newly formed Frontline Socialist Party through its 445-page book on the JVP’s path from 1978 to 2012, billed as a self-criticism but really a critique of its parent party. Its young members are committed, he says, but their thinking still lives before the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending with Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book romanticises JVP culture without asking why idealistic youth became executioners in 1988–89. He traces a thread through the JVP’s history: after Wijeweera’s disappointing 273,248 votes in 1982, the party never found a leader the public would accept, backing Rajapaksa in 2005 and Fonseka in 2010 for want of its own candidate — a dilemma rooted in race, caste and religion. The FSP must put knowledge before action.