17 වැනි සංශෝධනය හා මැතිවරණ කොමිසම
Provincial elections are being held without the Elections Commission the 17th Amendment
requires, because Chandrika Kumaratunga refused to appoint one and the refusal has outlived
her. Ivan sets the Indian Election Commission against it — its own budget, its own
quasi-judicial powers, 668 million voters and 800,000 polling stations — and argues that an
amendment bolted on to a constitution built around an unaccountable president was never
going to hold.
රනිල් වික්රමසිංහටත් ජනාධිපති ක්රමය එපාවේ!
Ivan notes that if Ranil Wickremesinghe’s complaint is Mahinda Rajapaksa rather than the
system, then removing the man and preserving the machine is the wrong remedy — and that his
promise to abolish the executive presidency under a UNP government reads as a concession to
his party rather than a conviction. Some presidents built things within the corrupt system,
he grants; but what has hollowed out the rule of law is the system, not the individual.
දුම්රිය ගමන හා වේගය
A commuter’s letter about the two and a half hours from Galle to Colombo sends Ivan through
the history of travelling speed, from the ox cart at eight miles an hour to trains that now
exceed three hundred. Sri Lanka had the best railway in colonial Asia and has since
shortened rather than extended it; nine hundred level crossings on a thousand kilometres of
track are what hold the trains back. He recalls Lalith Athulathmudali’s expressway joining
Hambantota to Jaffna, and finds the same instinct in the Yal Devi announcement.
සාකච්ඡා කිරීම හා සටන් කිරීම
Accused at a public forum of helping the government’s war, Ivan answers by setting out
thirty years of his own dealings with power: the twenty-odd statements he has given the CID,
the night J.R. Jayewardene ordered him to drop a column and the month he obeyed before
resuming it, the raid on the Ravaya office five days after he declined President Premadasa’s
invitation, and the meetings with Chandrika Kumaratunga after attacks on journalists.
Journalists, he argues, should be able to telephone anyone in the country; the fault lies
only in misusing the connection.
පරාජයට බිය නොවන රනිල්
Ivan reads the revolt against Ranil Wickremesinghe at Sirikotha as an illustration of the
political system’s absurdity: a party with no constitutional means of removing its own
leader, in which the leader holds the same absolute power over the party that the president
holds over the country. He imagines Ranil’s arithmetic — his uncle reached the top at
seventy-one — and concludes that until the party gives itself a civilised constitution,
nothing it does about the man will matter.
ශ්රී ලංකාවේ දෙමළ ජාතික අරගළය
A comprehensive historical analysis reflecting on the defeat of the LTTE and the 25-year armed struggle. Tracing the political history from the colonial Colebrooke-Cameron reforms to the post-independence Sinhala Only Act and university standardization policies, the author examines the root causes of the conflict. The piece argues that while discriminatory policies by Sinhalese governments fueled the crisis, Tamil political leaders also shared blame due to their utopian demands, lack of pragmatic foresight, and early reliance on ethnic nationalism.
ප්රතිවාදී නායකයන් අඟුටුමිට්ටන් බවට පත්වී ජනාධිපති යෝධයකු බවට පත්වීම
An analysis of the Sri Lankan political landscape following the 2009 provincial council elections. The article discusses how Mahinda Rajapaksa solidified his power, rendering opposition leaders like Ranil Wickremesinghe politically impotent and crippling the UNP and JVP. The author urges the President not to misuse this massive mandate like J.R. Jayewardene did, but instead use it to dismantle the corrupt political system, establish private universities, eradicate ethnic divisions, and build a truly democratic nation.
සිදුවූයේ කුමක්ද? විය හැක්කේ කුමක්ද?
Sri Lanka’s throat was caught in two nooses, Ivan writes — terrorism and the political system — and the first is nearly loosed. He explains his own shift: he doubted the account that armed struggle followed the failure of non-violent politics, doubted the Tamil homeland claim, and was moved decisively by the LTTE’s treatment of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who had given them more space than any Sinhala leader and whom they destroyed politically. He defends Rajapaksa’s decision as the most important and most dangerous taken since independence, and argues the war could have gone very differently had the LTTE succeeded in mass suicide attacks, a single trap killing thousands of soldiers, or coordinated massacres in fifty or sixty villages. He then judges the opposition, the courts and the press all to have acted without responsibility, and disputes the reported threatening of Poddala Jayantha and Sanath Balasuriya by the Defence Secretary.
අලුතෙන් හිතන්නට කාලය පැමිණ තිබේ
Sri Lanka is close to winning one of the two decisive questions before it. Where every previous approach had failed and the country was stuck with no end in sight, Rajapaksa made a reckless attempt, staking his own survival and the country’s on fighting the LTTE to a military defeat, and went on down that road against opposition at home and abroad. The world thought he would destroy the country and himself; instead he reached the post he aimed at. The world is changed by those who swim upstream, and until they arrive they are taken for madmen rather than heroes. Military defeat will not settle the ethnic question by itself, but it creates conditions in which it can be settled — and doing so is the shared responsibility of everyone, with the opposition’s duty being to help rather than obstruct. The second question, replacing a disordered political system, needs the same cooperation.
අඳුරු වලා මැද රිදී රේඛා
Ivan argues the coming military victory will change the picture of the country. The decision to fight the LTTE to a military defeat broke with every previous government’s policy, taken against a recognised ceasefire, an established belief that only negotiation could work, and the near-universal opposition of the donor group — and Rajapaksa’s resolve in holding to it under sustained pressure was, he writes, unequalled. He will enter history as the first leader in the modern world to prove a terrorist movement can be defeated by war, and if he also answers Tamil grievances, as one who did both. The gains will follow: aid for the north and east, tourism, paramilitaries disarmed, the army turned to building roads, high security zones released to their owners. Credit belongs to the service chiefs, above all the army commander, and to a Defence Secretary who could obtain whatever he asked because he was the President’s brother.