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.
අගවිනිසුරුගේ දෝෂාභියෝගයෙන් පන පෙවෙන වත්කම් බැරකම් නීතිය
Two of the impeachment charges against the Chief Justice concern her asset declarations, and Ivan argues that whatever their merit they have revived a powerful but neglected law. He explains the 1975 Declaration of Assets and Liabilities Law and its 1988 amendment, which gave any citizen the right to inspect declarations and did not exempt the president. He recounts learning of the law from MP C.V. Gooneratne in the late 1980s, asking the Secretary-General of Parliament for MPs’ declarations, persuading G.L. Peiris, and later testing the Kumaratunga government and the Election Commissioners, and calls for the law to be updated and strictly enforced.
කරුගේ ඇස් පෑදීම
Ivan welcomes Karu Jayasuriya’s call for the fragmented opposition to unite under a common banner to abolish the executive presidency, noting that for the first time Jayasuriya speaks of the political system as a whole. A statement is not enough, he argues, without a working programme, and he sets out six observations: the system has run its historical course; it fragments the opposition; it has lost legitimacy; it lets ruling groups drain the country’s wealth; it encourages corruption by removing old safeguards such as the ban on MPs doing business with the state; and it makes the rule of law, urged by the Lessons Learnt commission, impossible to achieve.
සටනකට පෙර ස්වයං විවේචනයකට
Responding to a public statement by a group of Tamil intellectuals led by the Bishop of Mannar, Rayappu Joseph, which urges the Tamil National Alliance to reject the 13th Amendment, boycott talks and stay out of the Northern Provincial Council election, Ivan argues that they are again pointing Tamils down the road to ruin. Before any new struggle, he says, the Tamil leadership must honestly ask why the last one failed: the separate-state goal was a fantasy of the traditional leaders, the 1977 mandate was far from overwhelming, J.R. Jayewardene’s 1978 Constitution met many language grievances, and Prabhakaran killed more Tamils than the security forces did. Like Gandhi’s Congress or Martin Luther King’s movement, Tamils should seek equal rights within a Sri Lankan nation and a democratic society.
අනුරුද්ධ රත්වත්ත
Anuruddha has died, and as a man who was close to him for a time Ivan thinks it important to set down a note about him. What follows is a personal account, including the plain observation that neither Anuruddha nor Chandrika appears to have had full confidence in the other when she was brought into the SLFP.
විද්යුත් කැලෑ පත්තර සදාචාරය
It was reported that the telecommunications regulatory commission had made the e-News website hard to reach, and a number of local and foreign media organisations protested, as did the American and European Union missions. Ivan’s article is about what those websites do and about the freedom they claim.
විරුද්ධ පක්ෂ හා ආණ්ඩු පක්ෂ දේශපාලනයේ ශ්රාස්ත්රීය දුගීභාවය
Ivan opens with a telephone conversation with an educated man of some standing inside the UNP who is himself a subject of argument there, and the question he put to him. What follows is an account of the intellectual poverty on both sides, of the deceiving of party members, of family politics, and of the limits of the forward vision on offer.
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.
දූෂණයට එරෙහිව හා තොරතුරු අයිතිය වෙනුවෙන් කරන සටනේ අවුල
India’s anti-corruption movement, and the satyagraha Anna Hazare carried out to bring the struggle to a logical end, finished by winning the object they had set — an independent anti-corruption institution under a public ombudsman. It has not been discussed enough in Sri Lanka, Ivan writes, and it can be counted the largest popular revolution in India since Gandhi’s.
යූඑන්පී අර්බුදය
A great deal can be learned from the UNP’s leadership crisis, not only about that party but about the political culture of Sri Lanka. Removing a party leader is extremely difficult: there is no simple, clear method in the party constitution for the membership to use when they want one removed, and nothing about how a group carrying on an internal struggle should proceed — and that is true of every party in the country.