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.
ජනාධිපති හා ජවි පෙරමුණ
The president had learned from his own experience that he could not go on with the JVP, and letting go of it meant either an election or building a government with the Muslim Congress, the plantation workers’ congress and a substantial piece of the UNP. Ivan then turns on the former president, waiting in England for him to stumble, and ends: rulers must have brains, or else the ruled must; when both are without judgement, a country’s ruin cannot be prevented.
රාවයට අවුරුදු විස්සයි
Ravaya completes twenty years in August, and they were not twenty quiet years but twenty full of crises and bloodshed. Rather than boast about what the paper did in them, Ivan writes, it is more useful to describe how the country looks to Ravaya after them — and the survey that follows takes the people, the intellectuals, the religious leaders, the political leaders, parliament, the judiciary, the press, the Sinhala-Tamil quarrel and the country’s future in turn.
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.
සිදුවෙමින් තිබෙන්නේ කුමක්ද?
A significant group of UNP members is about to cross to the government, which ends its dependence on the JVP and unsettles the SLFP’s own office-holders. From there Ivan turns to the psychology underneath the crisis: the Sinhalese, seventy-three per cent of the country, think of themselves as a minority, and the Tamils, twelve per cent, think of themselves as a majority — each measuring itself against the world rather than the island.
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.
දෙමළ අරගලයට වැරදුණේ කොතැනද?
However far you have come, if you have taken the wrong road you should not be reluctant to turn back. Ivan argues the Tamil struggle went wrong at the choice of objective: a separate state was chosen emotionally, not from an assessment, at a moment when the traditional Tamil leadership had failed the militant young. He then lists what that choice forced — expulsions, defections to the army, and treating every non-Tamil community in the chosen territory as an enemy.
ලලිත් – ප්රේමදාස
Lalith Athulathmudali and Ranasinghe Premadasa were killed seven days apart fourteen years ago. Ivan writes them as a pair: Athulathmudali, who had every qualification to rule and was killed before he could, second only to C.W.W. Kannangara among those who served the country without ever governing it; and Premadasa, who came from outside the elite and won the office anyway. He ends with three unsolved puzzles — the two killings and the Town Hall bomb that cost Chandrika Kumaratunga an eye.
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.