කුල දේශපාලනය වම හා බර්නාඩ්
Written to carry on an argument Uvindu had opened about the Samasamaja leader Bernard Soysa’s attachment to his own caste. Ivan starts from Jayadeva Uyangoda’s finding that Sri Lanka’s discussion of social equality has never included caste equality, and works through what happened at Akuressa in the second insurrection, where the quarrel between young people of oppressed castes and the traditional left movement came into the open.
ව්යවස්ථා සභාව, උයන්ගොඩ හා විග්නේෂ්වරම්
The Jathika Hela Urumaya objects to Jayadeva Uyangoda’s nomination to the Constitutional
Council because he once served a twelve-year sentence, and the prime minister to C.V.
Wigneswaran’s. Ivan answers that the 1977 government repealed the law Uyangoda was sentenced
under and gazetted that it should not follow him, that Gandhi, Mandela and D.S. Senanayake
were all imprisoned men, and that being Tamil does not make a retired Supreme Court judge a
separatist. The deeper fault, he argues, is a constitution written to place the president
above itself.
ඇනීටා, ප්රභාකරන් හා චන්ද්රිකා
Prompted by Anita Pratap’s book Island of Blood, Ivan recalls his own part in the 1994–95 peace efforts: prison talks with Tamil detainees after 1971, his view that Chandrika Kumaratunga used the peace issue for Tamil votes, his attempt to broker trust between her and Ranil Wickremesinghe, and a March 1995 Jaffna visit where he helped secure the release of fifteen police prisoners. He also recounts learning from Anton Balasingham of a secret message she sent Prabhakaran through Pratap, and the resumption of war in April 1995.
Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna: What Is It? Where Is It Going?
Writing as a former member of the JVP’s 1971 leadership, Ivan argues that the party now trading on the prestige of the April 1971 revolt is no longer the movement that fought it. Of the twelve-member Political Bureau only Rohana Wijeweera remains, none of the nineteen second-line leaders does, only two of the forty-one accused in the main case, and fewer than one in twenty of the 15,000 members of 1971. Ivan explains the old guard’s departure as the product of prison study, accuses Wijeweera of branding former comrades traitors and police agents, and describes a party without a constitution or conference, run by one man, whose young followers want only action.