රට මුහුණ දී තිබෙන සියලු අවුල්වල මුල ඇත්තේ නිදහසේ
There is a connection between everything now insoluble and the independence said to have been won in 1948. We are a country that did not fight for it: it came from the English as a gift. Had we had to fight as India did, Ivan argues, the natives divided by race, religion, language and caste would have had to be brought together against a common enemy, and that welding is what never happened.
විසඳුමකින් තොරව කුණුවන ජනවාර්ගික අර්බුදයට වගකිවයුත්තේ කව්ද?
The ethnic crisis is rotting without a settlement, and the rot in it is distorting the whole political system. Ivan goes back to the making of the first government — the Ceylon Indian Congress members who would not support D.S. Senanayake, and the bargains struck to hold a government together — and forward to the conclusion that after more than a hundred thousand dead in the armed movements and the repression of the south and the north, the people left alive are living without a conscience and without a soul.
බලය සඳහා සිහින දැකීම
The political forces are changing shape and nobody can say what it will mean. Ivan reads the JVP stepping back from its alliance, the UNP losing members to the government, and the all-party proposals that would make the executive president answerable to parliament — and notes what it would cost the president’s opponents if he actually did it. Premadasa played the villain once; it is Mahinda Rajapaksa’s turn.
තමුසෙ කව්ද?
B.H. Farmer saw Sri Lanka’s present crisis coming, and wrote as early as 1963 that the country had divided beyond reassembly — by caste, by community and by religion. Ivan builds on him: the divisions return again and again, sometimes of themselves and sometimes when the poor are given someone to blame, and the politics of proving yourself a better Buddhist than the next man makes the quarrel worse.
දුශ්ශීලවාදයෙන් පසු රනිල්ගේ අනන්යතා වාදය
At the D.R. Wijewardena awards the opposition leader blamed journalists for destroying the Sri Lankan identity that Wijewardena began and D.S. Senanayake built. Ivan answers with the history: the 1911 educated Ceylonese seat, the manoeuvre to keep a Karava candidate out of it, and Ponnambalam Ramanathan brought back from retirement in India to prevent it. Palaces built on sand fall down, and this one was built by Ranil Wickremesinghe’s own forebears.
සිංහල ප්රභාකරන්ලාගෙන් පරිස්සම් වෙමු
It is not only the politicians who have made the country wretched, Ivan writes: it is the unreason that rules the society, and the educated who hold the ideological ground are less educated than the unlettered. From the Peradeniya hostel dispute he turns to C. Suntharalingam, whom he calls the political midwife who cut Prabhakaran’s cord, and to Nalin de Silva, who he says would earn the same honour on the day a Sinhala Prabhakaran is born.
Sri Lanka: Another cause for failure
Dharmapala and Marx, the Soulbury Constitution broken before the ink was dry, and the citizenship of the plantation workers. Victor Ivan traces the decline to the choices made at the moment of independence.
Reawakening of Tamil society
The Pothuvil to Polikandy march reads to Victor Ivan as a Tamil society waking up. He sets it beside the two Sinhala insurrections and the failure, since 1948, to build a nation any minority could belong to.
Understanding core issues: The key for solution
Answering readers who asked for a solution, Victor Ivan goes back to the core issues — the limits of the independence Sri Lanka was given, the disenfranchisements that followed, and the nation never built.
Foundations of incivility
Why does a country tolerate constitutional violation after constitutional violation without protest? Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the intellectual poverty of the Left, the language question and the habit of judicial silence.