අරාජිකත්වයේ අභියෝගය
Ivan reads the weeks since Vesak as signs of a country drifting into anarchy: rotten institutions are collapsing with nothing to replace them. A monk’s staged self-immolation, sold to television by a journalist as an exclusive; a Deputy Inspector General, Vass Gunawardena, exposed as a kidnapper and contract killer; the fusion of politicians and the criminals who guarded them during the insurgencies; and a push to scrap the Thirteenth Amendment unilaterally. He traces Indo-Lankan hostility to the UNP’s 1977 insults to Indira Gandhi and warns that breaking the Accord would complete the slide.
රාවය ප්රතිසංවිධාන
Ivan replies to Mahesh Hapugoda, who read his wish to make Ravaya a paper for readers’ wives and children as a slide into Nihal Peiris-style entertainment. He rejects both that reading and its view of women, and offers as proof a piece written for parents and daughters: on whether one needs a hero. His own is Gandhi, with Socrates second; he recalls his lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna, who modelled himself on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, contrasts J.R. Jayewardene’s Napoleon, and warns through Nietzsche, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran against hero worship.
අධිවේග මාර්ග හා දැක්මේ තිබෙන පුංචිකම
Recalling Lalith Athulathmudali’s dream of an expressway joining Hambantota and Jaffna through Colombo, Ivan contrasts the British road and rail network, the best in South Asia at independence, with the neglect that followed, as J.R. Jayewardene poured money into an airline against Lee Kuan Yew’s advice. The Southern Expressway is fast, he says, but serves the car-owning rich; built over a modernised double-track railway it would have needed no land acquisition and served the poor too. On his reckoning it will take two centuries to repay.
නව ව්යවස්ථාව ගැන
Continuing his response to the draft Nineteenth Amendment, Ivan sets out how a new constitution should be made: first agree the principles with the public, as South Africa and India did, then draft. He argues it must define a Sri Lankan nation of equal peoples and outlaw caste discrimination; return to a reformed parliamentary system with a mixed electoral system, a Senate and an Indian-style election commission; devolve power to village and district councils; bind governments to national policy frameworks, above all a foreign policy that respects India; and make the state secular.
19 වැනි සංශෝධන කෙටුම්පත ගැන
Ivan welcomes the campaign by Maduluwawe Sobitha’s National Movement for a Just Society to abolish the executive presidency, but argues its draft Nineteenth Amendment is a concept paper with a narrow vision. Every Sri Lankan constitution, and Chandrika Kumaratunga’s 2000 draft, was made by cunning or majority power rather than on the sovereignty of the people, as India and South Africa did. The draft ignores the unresolved question of who belongs to the nation, copies the flawed Constitutional Council of the Seventeenth Amendment, and keeps a simple-majority impeachment of judges.
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.
ලේ තැවරුණු නිදහසේ හැටපස් වසර
On the 65th anniversary of independence, Ivan argues that Sri Lanka never met the two conditions a nation-state needed: a united nation and a democratic political society. Contrasting India’s mass freedom struggle and three-year constituent assembly with Ceylon’s bloodless, deferential transfer of power, he recalls caste and religion used against A.E. Goonesinha, E.W. Perera and Arunachalam, and Oliver Goonetilleke’s manipulation of the Soulbury Commission. Each constitution since, culminating in the executive presidency, has deepened the distortion.
ආණ්ඩුවේ ඉදිරි දැක්ම හා කාර්ය සාධනය
Ivan assesses the Rajapaksa government from its narrow 2005 victory to its unrivalled post-war dominance, crediting the defeat of the LTTE and real progress in resettlement and rehabilitation. He argues that the UNP’s opposition to the war destroyed its own base, that the government has given Tamils everything except their dignity, and that leaning towards China while breaking promises to India ignores the island’s geopolitical position. Mahinda Rajapaksa, he concludes, dreams like Lee Kuan Yew, Mahathir or J.R. Jayewardene of development without democracy.
ජේ.ආර්.ගෙන් ඉගෙන ගැනීම
Ivan argues that the government won the battle over the Chief Justice at a ruinous cost, leaving constitutional interpretation and the writ jurisdiction hollow. He faults the judges and lawyers for fighting like a political party, recalls the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his own challenge to Sarath N. Silva’s appointment, and draws a close parallel between Mahinda Rajapaksa’s removal of Shirani Bandaranayake and J.R. Jayewardene’s stripping of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s civic rights, warning that Jayewardene’s drive for unchangeable power ended in Black July, two insurrections and his own humiliation.