Lawful public uprising! (2)
Part two turns to why liberalism never took here. Victor Ivan sets the JVP and the LTTE side by side as movements that drove their own communities into racism.
Dilemmas of Sri Lanka
Whatever his history, Gotabaya Rajapaksa now governs those who voted against him too. Victor Ivan turns from the presidency to stray dogs, crop-raiding wildlife, milk and meat — and argues for an agrarian revolution.
The presidency and the dilemma of the Presidential Election
J.R. Jayewardene built the presidency to make himself a king; the 19th Amendment hollowed it out but left the crown on. Victor Ivan reads the 2019 field — Gotabaya, the UNP’s impasse, the JVP — against that comedy.
Failure of the Left Movement
From the Old Left’s Marxist head on a liberal trunk to the JVP after two insurrections, Victor Ivan asks why the Left has failed — and what the JVP should do with the presidential election in front of it.
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.
වරද කාගේද අපේද? මහින්දගේද?
Ivan argues that once the country turned to violence, both rebels and the state came to rule through fear and to believe only their own convictions. The state crushed the Sinhala youth rebellion, then the Tamil one, and in the process the South killed Wijeweera and many of its own. The tragedy, he writes, is that after these victories the country learned nothing: there was no Emperor Asoka turning from war to righteousness, only a triumphalism that left the nation where it started. Blame lies with society as well as with Mahinda Rajapaksa.
අර්බුදය මට පෙනෙන හැටි (අවසන් කොටස)
Ivan divides the post-independence period into two eras and traces the second, from 1977: a government that could not be changed, thuggery institutionalised in the universities and unions, Black July and the JVP ban, and the violent era of 1985 to 2009, including Indian intervention and the state’s brutal suppression of the second JVP rising under Premadasa. Kumaratunga’s People’s Alliance continued the corrupt system, and Mahinda Rajapaksa, after defeating Prabhakaran, chose a stinking path instead of reconciliation, leaving the country as isolated as it was when Prabhakaran was strong.
සිංහල-බෞද්ධ මනස තේරුම් ගැනීම
Responding to Kusal Perera’s ‘In Search of the New Man’, Ivan revisits two debates: Newton Gunasinghe’s great and little traditions, which suggest Sinhala cultural narrowness belongs to the era of decline rather than all history, and Sarachchandra’s claim, contested by Martin Wickramasinghe, that Buddhism does not see art as purifying. Europe escaped a similar world-denial through the Renaissance; Sri Lanka’s revivals, independence movement and parties never produced one. Every movement from Dharmapala and Bandaranaike to Wijeweera and the JHU has pandered to the Sinhala-Buddhist mind, shaped by an island that kept its identity against India, rather than changing it.
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.
රාවය ප්රතිසංවිධාන
Ivan replies to Mahesh Hapugoda, who read his wish to make Ravaya a paper for readers’ wives and children as a slide into Nihal Peiris-style entertainment. He rejects both that reading and its view of women, and offers as proof a piece written for parents and daughters: on whether one needs a hero. His own is Gandhi, with Socrates second; he recalls his lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna, who modelled himself on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, contrasts J.R. Jayewardene’s Napoleon, and warns through Nietzsche, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran against hero worship.