ආණ්ඩුව ගමන් මග වෙනස් කරයි!
Two significant men came to Sri Lanka last week, one from Ireland and one from India. Martin McGuinness — a pioneer of the Irish peace movement, a figure in Sinn Féin and, Ivan writes, the godfather of the IRA — came to meet the leadership of the LTTE and not the president. The Indian foreign secretary saw the president and then the leader of the opposition at length, pressing India’s interest in a larger part in settling the crisis.
දේශපාලන ගමන් මග
Only the government is in a stable condition at this moment and every other party is in crisis — and the government’s stability is not secure either. The JVP can neither join the government wholly nor separate from it wholly, and its attempt to bring the government entirely onto its own agenda has failed. The tail wags as the dog wants, Ivan writes; the dog cannot be wagged as the tail wants.
අධිකරණය විසින් අර්බුදය කබලෙන් ලිපට දැමීම
Instead of helping to put out the fire burning in the country the judiciary is feeding it straw. The North and the East were merged under the Indo-Lanka accord, under Indian pressure and on the strong demand of Tamil politicians, in recognition that those areas are the traditional homeland of the Tamil people and in order to build a provincial council system to fit. Whether it is their historical homeland was always arguable — and it was not for a court to settle it this way.
රටට අවශ්යව ඇත්තේ ආවේගනො ව, සන්සුන්කම හා බුද්ධියයි
In the name of defending Sri Lanka’s honour, every politician is pushing the country towards ruin. Ivan says the shouting against a debate in the British parliament is shouting without having understood the debate, and that outside interference grows precisely when we fail to settle our own problems — like a row of houses where the people in the burning one will not put the fire out.
මහින්දගේ කොටි විරෝධී යුද්ධය හා දෙමළ ජනතාවගේ අනාගතය
The war has reached a decisive stage: the east taken, Mannar taken, the army inside Kilinochchi. Ivan works through the inevitability of the war, the idea of a homeland, what has changed in the fighting, who gains from it, and what it means for Tamil civilians — and argues that the LTTE’s two greatest blunders were killing Rajiv Gandhi and stopping Ranil Wickremesinghe from winning in 2005.
ඉන්දියානු මැදිහත්වීමක් සිදුවිය හැකිද?
Does the agitation in Tamil Nadu point to a repeat of 1987? Ivan says the mood there looks manufactured rather than spontaneous, and that it has appeared at the moment the war was reaching its logical end. He recalls Vadamarachchi and the food drop that followed, and argues that the answer is not anti-Indian marches but looking after the displaced properly while the fighting goes on.
Paradise in Tears
Written from a sick bed after Shehan Karunatilaka praised ‘Paradise in Tears’. Victor Ivan recalls Mangala Samaraweera’s intervention, the Indian investigator who bought three copies, and the ten-year struggle against Sarath Silva.
රජිව් ගාන්ධි ලංකාවේ වීරයෙක්ද? ද්රෝහියෙක්ද?
After a brief tribute to the Elections Commissioner for requiring asset declarations with nominations, Ivan marks the Accord’s 26th anniversary by defending Rajiv Gandhi against the Sinhala view of him as a scheming invader. Drawing on J.N. Dixit, he recounts Rajiv’s insistence on signing amid riots, his calm after a sailor’s rifle-butt blow, his concessions to Prabhakaran and the IPKF operations that led to his assassination. The IPKF, he argues, saved the state from two simultaneous insurgencies until Premadasa armed the LTTE; Sri Lanka should honour Rajiv with a statue.
ඉන්දු-ලංකා ගිවිසුම ආපසු හැරී බැලීමක්
As the government retreats from diluting the Thirteenth Amendment before the Northern Provincial Council election, Ivan argues that the Indo-Lanka Accord is an international treaty that cannot be changed unilaterally — and that after the war India, as Shivshankar Menon told him, would have backed a better devolution scheme. Drawing on K.M. de Silva and J.N. Dixit, he corrects the popular belief that the Accord was forced on Sri Lanka by the 1987 airdrop: it grew from the 1985 Delhi Accord, and without the IPKF the state might not have survived two insurgencies.
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.