මහගමසේකර ප්රහේලිකාව හා අර්බුදයට තිබෙන අර්ථකථනයේ දුගීභාවය
Mahagama Sekera was an artist the country loved and respected, of the first rank in several branches of art at once, and the authenticity in his work was the artistic expression of the authenticity in his life. Ivan had a puzzle about him he could not settle for years: why the statue of him at the junction where you enter his village had been attacked, several times, by somebody.
සරත් නන්ද සිල්වාගේ ක්රියාකාරකම් සොයා බැලීම
The select committee the government means to appoint to inquire into the improper acts done while Sarath N. Silva held the office of chief justice has become a subject of argument, and the first man to challenge it is Sarath N. Silva. He says appointing one two years after his retirement is an act of revenge, and that such a committee could damage judicial independence.
විරුද්ධ පක්ෂ හා ආණ්ඩු පක්ෂ දේශපාලනයේ ශ්රාස්ත්රීය දුගීභාවය
Ivan opens with a telephone conversation with an educated man of some standing inside the UNP who is himself a subject of argument there, and the question he put to him. What follows is an account of the intellectual poverty on both sides, of the deceiving of party members, of family politics, and of the limits of the forward vision on offer.
යුද්ධය හා ජනවර්ග අර්බුදය
Written for the Tamil-language Veerakesari at that paper’s invitation, and it begins by placing its author: the man writing to a Tamil paper about what the Tamil people face after the war is not a Tamil but a Sinhalese — and not a Sinhalese born in a Sinhala area but one born in Batticaloa, who drove his pen to build Sinhala opinion in recognition that a grave injustice had been done to the Tamil nation.
නව ආණ්ඩුක්රම ව්යවස්ථාවක් ඇතිකර ගැනීම
Constitutional reform deserves more of the public’s attention than the parliamentary election itself. The government asks for a two-thirds majority to change the system, but Ivan argues it does not need one: a constitution is a social contract, and no single party represents the whole of a society made up of the SLFP, the UNP, the JVP, the Tamil National Alliance, the Hela Urumaya and much else. Sri Lanka’s record here is poor — three constitutions since independence and now a fourth, where countries write them to last centuries. America has the world’s shortest and has not tired of it in two hundred years; India has the longest and credits it with meeting each challenge. Bandaranaike in 1970 and Jayewardene in 1977 both used their majorities to exclude the opposition; Nehru, with a comparable majority, spent three and a half years including everyone. Rajapaksa should not repeat their mistake.
ව්යවස්ථා සභාව, උයන්ගොඩ හා විග්නේෂ්වරම්
The Jathika Hela Urumaya objects to Jayadeva Uyangoda’s nomination to the Constitutional
Council because he once served a twelve-year sentence, and the prime minister to C.V.
Wigneswaran’s. Ivan answers that the 1977 government repealed the law Uyangoda was sentenced
under and gazetted that it should not follow him, that Gandhi, Mandela and D.S. Senanayake
were all imprisoned men, and that being Tamil does not make a retired Supreme Court judge a
separatist. The deeper fault, he argues, is a constitution written to place the president
above itself.
රටේ දේශපාලන නායකත්වය පිළිබඳ ගැටලුව
A Sunday Times survey of 519 people for the sixtieth anniversary asked which post-independence leader had most capacity to take the country forward. No leader had won the confidence of a majority; D.S. Senanayake came first and even he scored low; Chandrika Kumaratunga drew one per cent. Ivan reads the result as a verdict on what the office does to whoever holds it.
Fifty three years of incomplete freedom
The fifty-third anniversary of independence falls today. The country was moving from feudalism to capitalism, and what was expected of independence was not freedom from colonialism — colonialism had produced only a modern nationalist state. National integration was the condition of real independence, and it was never met.
Self interest in making constitutions
As a nation we are on the edge of a great abyss, and the leaders behave like crabs dancing in water until it boils — so blinded by hunger for power that they cannot see the danger to themselves, let alone the danger to the country.