අර්බුදය ඓතිහාසික දෘෂ්ටියකින් දැකීම
Political outlook is an important factor in whether political struggles bear fruit. Ivan is not a Marxist, and he accepts the idea that theory guides practice: there are political struggles in this country and they happen without a meaningful forward vision, and that is why the fighters have become people running on the spot.
හෘදය සාක්ෂියේ වික්ෂෝභය (3)
What Ivan sets out to analyse here is the moral crisis facing a society that has to live crushed between the two naked powers of an armed struggle for state power, when both sides stand level with each other — and specifically how that worked on the Sinhala society of the south during the JVP’s second insurrection.
නිදහසේ වාන් දොර ඇරීම
A fundamental change in the political system is essential to any good forward movement for the society and the country — and without overcoming the challenge Prabhakaran’s movement posed to the state, there was no possibility of making one. That challenge was itself something this corrupt political system enlarged: there was a problem before it, and this system turned it into a tangle that could not easily be settled.
සදාචාර අර්බුදය ජයගැනීම හා ගාන්ධි
The article on the moral decay among professionals brought a response good enough to satisfy him: one man he knows telephoned to say it was good enough to have muddled his head, another praised the approach while blaming him for stopping the Gandhi series in the middle, and a Tamil lawyer married to a Sinhala woman had his own things to say.
දෙමළ ප්රශ්නය හා සුනිල් විජේසිරිවර්ධන
An interview with Dr Sunil Wijesiriwardena on the Tamil question appeared in the last Ravaya, and the purpose of this article is to question one idea in it — the idea that governs everything else he says there. The claim that no attempt was made to give a fair political settlement and that war was all that was done is, Ivan writes, entirely wrong.
නව අගවිනිසුරු හා මහජන අපේක්ෂා
Ivan wishes the newly appointed chief justice well — and records that he wished her predecessor well in the same way, expecting him to put right some part of the enormous damage Sarath N. Silva had done to the courts, and that it has to be said with regret that nothing of the kind happened.
අභියෝගය ජයගැනීම
Whatever the wrongs and shortcomings within the counter-campaigns launched to defeat the terrorist war Prabhakaran led and the terrorist war Wijeweera led, had those campaigns failed and those two movements won, what could have followed was a great destruction. In that sense, Ivan writes, whatever their faults, those campaigns protected the country’s existence.
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 කැඳවා ගෙන ඒම (3)
Gandhi’s analysis of the crisis modern Sri Lanka faces and of the way to overcome it comes with his commentary on Sri Lankan history, and this instalment is his reading of the Portuguese and Dutch periods: the conversions, the Karava and Salagama communities, the Malays, and the taking of the Kandyan kingdom.
කිරි කළයට ගොම දැමීම
The prime minister told parliament during the emergency debate that the intelligence services had information about training at three secret camps in Tamil Nadu, aimed at killing Indian leaders and re-establishing the LTTE in Sri Lanka. If there is no true basis for it, Ivan replies, talk of that kind can do the country real harm — it can discourage the foreign investment Sri Lanka is hoping for.