චන්ද්‍රිකා මැතිනියනි, සුදු නෙළුමක් මෙන් නැවත පිපී රාජපක්ෂ ආධිපත්‍යයෙන් රට ගලවා ගනු මැනවි
Written as an open letter, and entirely ironic. Ivan reminds the former president of what her own hands did — the 226 acres taken from ordinary people at a nominal price for the parliamentary complex and passed to a project whose owner made a billion rupees from selling the rights, the land she had written into her own name on leaving office and had to give back, the UNESCO post she had to give up — before inviting her to save the country from her successor.
නිදහස, මර්දනය හා ජනමාධ්‍ය දේශපාලනය
The most personal piece of the year. Buddhika telephoned at three in the morning to say the Leader press had been burned; Ivan listened and went back to sleep, and the column is his reckoning with why. It becomes an account of two editors in the same trade on opposite sides — he fought Sarath N. Silva’s appointment as chief justice while Lasantha approved it — and of what S.B. Dissanayake told them about a plan to kill them both.
මහා දේශපාලන සන්ධානයක් අවශ්‍ය කුමක් සඳහා ද?
A grand alliance of everyone against Mahinda Rajapaksa is being discussed in every circle. Ivan asks what it would be for. He works through Mangala’s theory, Chandrika’s sermon, how much of the criticism is valid, and what change the country actually needs — and lists what an honest government could recover: land, privatisations sold to friends at nominal prices, broadcasting and liquor and transport licences.
මංගලගේ බලමේනියාව
Mangala Samaraweera tells Lakbima that today’s journalists keep their eyes and ears shut while a police state is built. Ivan replies that every government since 1977 has had the features of one, and that if this is the first Samaraweera has noticed he has an ailment needing treatment — then goes through Waters Edge, the violence and the killings, S.B. Dissanayake and the plunder of property.
පූර්ණ ප්‍රතිසංවිධානයක අවශ්‍යතාව
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s schools of thought still see the ethnic question as they did while Prabhakaran lived, arguing only over how much of the 13th Amendment to grant. The root problem, he says, is the failure after 1948 to build a united nation and a democratic society to sustain the state and democracy inherited from Britain: Burghers were driven out, Indian Tamil plantation workers lost their citizenship, Tamils lost language rights, and the 1972 and 1978 constitutions completed the decay of governance. With terrorism defeated, the rot is visible and the moment has come to rebuild nation and state together. He sets out an eighteen-point agenda — from abolishing caste discrimination and fixing national policies to curbing corruption, criminalised politics and inequality — for a four-to-five-year national programme involving all parties.
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.
අපරාධකරණය හා පාදඩකරණය
The clash at Kolonnawa on polling day between the government member Duminda Silva and the former member and presidential adviser Bharatha Lakshman Premachandra, and the tragedy that came of it, is a powerful event that gives a warning signal not only to the president and his party but to every political party in the country and to the society.
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.
ගාන්ධි නූතන ශ්‍රී ලංකාවට කැඳවාගෙන ඒම -5
As in many other colonised countries, the political awakening that sought reform came out of the religious revival — the native religions, pushed into a low condition under foreign rule, working to recover the standing they had held. In Ceylon that happened in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
ගාන්ධි නූතන ශ්‍රී ලංකාවට කැඳවාගෙන ඒම (4)
The British took the Kandyan kingdom in 1815 not by battle but by a crafty programme, and Sir John D’Oyly admitted as much in a long conversation, describing the programme he had run and naming several of the natives who acted as its chief pawns. It succeeded because of the support the Kandyan chiefs gave, in the expectation that the power to rule under British authority would come to them.