සුරන්ජිත් – නූතන මිස්කින්
Ivan first came to know the lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna at a moment when he was in difficulty before the High Court. Under the criminal defamation law — and before it the parliamentary privileges law — the favourite weapon against journalists who displeased governments, the case they won together did not only make the criminal defamation law unworkable; it showed the country that where the Supreme Court will not do justice, other institutions can.
එක්සත් ජාතීන්ගේ සංවිධානය සමග ගැටුමට යන ප්රතිපත්තියක් රටේ යහපතට හේතුවන්නේ නැත
Sri Lanka is being pushed towards a quarrel with the United Nations. Whatever its limits, it is the world body that represents the countries of the world; we are a member of it, we have signed its conventions, and staying a member carries the duty of respecting them. Rather than answer Allan Rock’s allegations against the army with anger, Ivan writes, finding out whether they are true and correcting the fault if they are would do the country’s honour more good.
පක්ෂ නායකයින්ගේ බූදල් බවට හැරී ඇති පක්ෂ අරමුදල්
Even a small funeral aid society in a village gives its members an account of what it took in and what it spent. Parties that handle hundreds of millions give their annual accounts neither to their members nor even to their own highest bodies. Every party has a treasurer and he is there in name only: the leader handles the money, the leader alone knows what the funds are, and no member may ask.
යුද්ධයේ අනාගතය ()
The government is still managing to run the war to its own advantage, and whether the LTTE’s retreat is temporary or permanent will be decided soon. Ivan puts the movement’s political immaturity at the centre of its decline — it should either not have destroyed Ranil Wickremesinghe, or, having done so, should have consolidated peace and pressed for a settlement instead of returning to claymore attacks.
ගාන්ධි ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Written because the Marx-or-Gandhi article drew more response than anything else that year. Ivan works through the armed struggle and its by-products, why Gandhi refused an intermediate peace, the non-cooperation campaign of 1920 and why he called it off over a single violent incident, the discipline, the caste and religious divides, and the women he trained into the Congress.
ඔබාමාගේ ජය සැමරුම හා විජේවීරගේ ඉල්මහ සැමරුම
Ivan reads everything written about Obama in the Sinhala press, and finds two sentences in the JVP’s own paper and no analysis at all. The same weekend the papers give Rohana Wijeweera large space. From there he asks the question the two commemorations put together: who may lead this country — and answers that leadership here is still fixed by race, religion and caste, and that the day talent alone decides it is the day the country becomes free.
Overcoming ideological anarchy
Mao on falling into pits. Victor Ivan argues that neither the protesters nor the opposition parties who borrowed their slogan have worked out whether it can actually be done.
කළයුත්තේ කුමක්ද?
Quoting Mao that falling into a pit teaches the mind, Ivan asks whether Sri Lankan society learns from its disasters. After defeating Wijeweera’s rising and then Prabhakaran, the country had a chance for an Asoka-like turn from war to reconciliation, but the victor was blinded by triumph. The crisis has taken a new form, hidden behind an illusion of development built on infrastructure and debt. The Rajapaksa government has lost its moral right to rule; the opposition’s first task is a common programme agreed through open negotiation.
අන්තෝ ජටා බහි ජටා
Ivan asks why more than a hundred thousand deaths in two insurrections have left so little mark on Sri Lankan thought and literature, recalling conversations with Simon Navagattegama and Ediriweera Sarachchandra and a sharp exchange with Sugathapala de Silva. He argues that caste, not only race and class, drove both rebellions: Wijeweera and Prabhakaran came from parallel non-dominant castes and drew their foot soldiers from oppressed ones. Only Premadasa grasped this, and the chance to rebuild society after the LTTE’s defeat has been squandered.
ජනතා විමුක්ති පෙරමුණේ දෙකඩවීම
Prompted by a 71-year-old reader in Kandy who hoped the JVP’s breakaway ‘people’s struggle’ group might revive Marxism, Ivan reflects on Marxism as a secular religion whose paradise collapsed with the socialist world, leaving devoted followers stranded. He remembers his lawyer and friend Suranjith, who gave years to the Communist Party, and the short story he wrote in prison after 1971 predicting that Mao’s own people would one day strike his statue. He recalls Leslie Goonewardene’s view that the LSSP split merely scattered a brilliant young generation — a warning for the new group — and argues that the old Left’s intellectual, liberal-democratic tradition deserves respect, that Wijeweera’s rejection of it was wrong, and that the dissidents stop their self-criticism short of Wijeweera and the two insurrections.