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.
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 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.
What is wrong with the Judiciary?
The jailing of Ranjan Ramanayake for contempt turns public sympathy against the courts. Victor Ivan asks what has gone wrong inside the Judiciary and answers with a series of cases from his own reporting.
What if everyone fails?
With every institution of the state failed, Victor Ivan asks who is left. He measures Champika Ranawaka against the standard and finds an educated man who is still, in his judgment, a tribal leader.
චෝගම්වලින් පසු ජනාධිපතිවරණයක්!
After a costly CHOGM that worsened Sri Lanka’s standing, Ivan predicts an early presidential election, called before a fragile economy — falling exports, heavy Chinese loans, banks lending to the state instead of business, finance companies near collapse — gives way. The government runs on three wheels, Mahinda, Basil and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and the family is fraying over succession, as D.S. Senanayake’s preference for Dudley once split the UNP. With discontent in the SLFP, the JHU and all communities, he foresees a three-cornered contest: Karu Jayasuriya on a system-change platform, Chandrika Kumaratunga seeking to reclaim the SLFP, and an unpredictable royal battle.
අරාජිකත්වයේ අත්තිවාරම්
Ivan argues that the government, lacking any theory of how rotten the whole system had become by the end of the war, is watching it collapse piece by piece into anarchy. Its answer to a corrupt police — sending the army, as at Rathupaswala — is worse than the disease. Champika Ranawaka’s own column describes a lumpen rich and a super-bureaucracy; the judiciary rotted under Sarath N. Silva; tax collection has collapsed into VAT fraud; and debt-funded infrastructure, the lost GSP+, the DCD milk-powder scare and the anti-fertiliser campaign over kidney disease all speed the slide.
විදුලි මාෆියාව ඇත්තක්ද?
Weighing the arguments of Tilak Siyambalapitiya, Udaya Gammanpila, Harsha de Silva, Champika Ranawaka and the CEB chairman on the 2013 power tariff increase, the article argues that the root problem is Sri Lanka’s dependence on oil-fired private power costing Rs 40–45 a unit against Rs 1.50 for hydro. It asks who blocked the Norochcholai coal plant in 2002 so that oil plants could be tendered instead, why the Chinese plant keeps breaking down, and why the one-sided private power contracts exposed by the Central Bank in 2007 remain secret.