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.
අෂ්රොෆ් ඔබට ආයුබෝවන්
A tribute to M.H.M. Ashraff, whom Ivan calls the most colourful Muslim leader since independence. He links Ashraff’s stand on Muslim identity to the concentrated farming Muslim community of the east, and recounts how in 1988 Badiudin Mahmud persuaded Sirimavo Bandaranaike to drop him from an opposition pact, driving him to back Ranasinghe Premadasa. Ivan recalls that Ashraff gave Chandrika Kumaratunga her 1994 majority yet privately criticised her, and that he publicly reversed his defence of Sarath N. Silva’s appointment after studying the documents.