මංගල හා ශ්රීපතිගේ මරාගෙන මැරෙන ප්රහාරය
Politically, Ivan reads the two men’s assault on the president as a suicide attack: destroying themselves in order to destroy him. He notes how carefully the charges were divided between them — the war to Sripathi, a short list to Mangala — and what the attack says in Aesop’s language: that the president has no vision, no gratitude, and thinks of his family rather than the country.
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.
The absence of leaders: A crisis
2015 was the last chance, Victor Ivan writes, and it was spent dishonestly. The column goes back through independence, the 1978 constitution and revolution and counter-revolution to explain the vacuum now left.
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.
මැතිවරණ තිබීම නිසා පමණක් රටක් ප්රජාතන්ත්රවාදීවන්නේ නැත
The true test of democracy, Ivan argues, is whether the opposition has a fair chance of winning power. Before 1977 it did: governments changed at almost every election, spending was capped, election petitions worked and the police stayed neutral. J.R. Jayewardene replaced that with a petrified system in which the president can call elections at will and turn every contest into a puppet show. Ivan recounts the rigging of the Jaffna Development Council poll, the 1999 installation of an outsider as acting Elections Commissioner, and a commissioner too afraid for his family to investigate forged ballots. The UNP, he says, now reaps what it sowed.
වර්ගවාදය හා නායකත්වයේ අර්බුදය
Lee Kuan Yew was right, this piece argues, that Sri Lanka failed because its leaders could not manage racial passions. Bandaranaike knew Sinhala Only without provision for Tamil was unjust, yet tore up his pact with Chelvanayakam under pressure from militant monks; Dudley Senanayake lacked the courage to see his own pact through; J.R. Jayewardene legislated District Development Councils but could not bear to see the TULF win Jaffna. Mahinda Rajapaksa had the golden chance after the war and let it pass. The Northern Provincial Council election is a silver lining, if leaders on all sides stop inciting their people.
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.
වරද කාගේද?
Ivan traces Sri Lanka’s three constitutions to argue that each was made by whichever party held the numbers, without the consensus a constitution demands. The Soulbury order, flawed but workable, let governments fall; Colvin R. de Silva’s 1972 constitution stripped away its safeguards and ignored the Tamil language question; J.R. Jayewardene’s 1978 system put all power in one unaccountable man. Yet the fault, he concludes, is not J.R.’s alone but a society given independence as a gift, democratic on the surface and feudal at the core.
දහතුනේ අවුල
To win India’s support against the LTTE, President Rajapaksa promised a ’13-plus’ political solution, and Tamil leaders, the UNP and the old Left now demand he keep it, while the JHU, JVP and NFF oppose it. Ivan argues that the President’s doubts are not unreasonable, because the ethnic question is one expression of a larger failure of the political system. He traces how Tamil demands grew from modest regional councils in the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam and Senanayake–Chelvanayakam pacts to the 1976 separate-state resolution, the 1977 mandate, Black July, the Thimpu principles and the Indo-Lanka Accord, and says the provincial council system was hastily designed under LTTE pressure. He proposes instead village councils like India’s panchayats, district councils (with a provincial council for the North if needed), a smaller Parliament and a Senate.
රාජපක්ෂ පාලනයේ හත් අවුරුද්ද
Mahinda Rajapaksa can be counted the most argued-about and the most powerful head of state Sri Lanka has produced since independence; before him that place belonged to J.R. Jayewardene. Five sections follow: social and family background, power and resolve, the lust for power, importance and power, and where it went wrong.