The end of an era of extremism
From the Mahavamsa to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Victor Ivan follows one line of thought through Sri Lankan history and argues that the era it produced is now, at last, ending.
’56 reborn
Gotabaya Rajapaksa won without the minorities. Victor Ivan reads the result as a second 1956 — a Sinhala-Buddhist revival in new clothes — and asks what kind of leader the country has just demanded.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
A cry for democracy
The TULF’s secretary has said that democracy cannot be safeguarded by four commissions alone and that the constitution has to change as well. Ivan agrees, and goes back to the 1930s to show what the country’s democratic tradition actually contained and who carried it.
සුළු ජාතීන් පිළිබඳ ගැටලුව හා යෝජිතස්වාධීන කොමිෂන් හතර
Answering TULF secretary R. Sampanthan, who said the four commissions cannot secure democracy without constitutional change for minorities, Ivan argues that the south’s democratic demands and the north’s minority rights are two sides of one crisis, rooted in a democracy received from the British without a unifying freedom struggle. He praises the Jaffna Youth Congress, Sri Nissanka and Wilmot Perera, and recalls how the citizenship laws and Sinhala Only overrode Soulbury safeguards while Chelvanayakam lost before a dependent judiciary. He urges Tamils and Muslims to back the commissions.