කියවීම හා ප්රශ්න කිරීම
A visit to Prem Dissanayake’s bookshop leads Ivan to a Sinhala translation of Martha Nussbaum’s ‘Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities’ by Liyanage Amarakeerthi. He laments a culture in which teachers, journalists and politicians rarely read — no Sri Lankan leader since D.S. Senanayake has written a serious book, unlike India’s — and in which publishers favour novels over ideas. Drawing on Nussbaum’s chapter on Socratic pedagogy, he argues that Sri Lanka treats the questioner as a traitor and must learn to read, argue and respect dissent.
19 වැනි සංශෝධන කෙටුම්පත ගැන
Ivan welcomes the campaign by Maduluwawe Sobitha’s National Movement for a Just Society to abolish the executive presidency, but argues its draft Nineteenth Amendment is a concept paper with a narrow vision. Every Sri Lankan constitution, and Chandrika Kumaratunga’s 2000 draft, was made by cunning or majority power rather than on the sovereignty of the people, as India and South Africa did. The draft ignores the unresolved question of who belongs to the nation, copies the flawed Constitutional Council of the Seventeenth Amendment, and keeps a simple-majority impeachment of judges.
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.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
වැරදුණේ කොතැනද? පැරණි වම හා නව වම
Marking N.M. Perera’s 106th birth anniversary, Ivan rejects the view — shared by the Frontline Socialists about the JVP — that the Left failed by abandoning class struggle for coalition politics. The old Left’s leaders were middle-class intellectuals of great learning, as Mick Moore described, and able administrators: Anil Moonesinghe made the CTB profitable and handed commission cars to the board, while Leslie Goonewardene refused Yugoslav money. The LSSP might have beaten the UNP in 1947 had it not opposed the war and fled to India, and lacked a Gandhi to hold it together. Its real error was believing socialism could be built through coalitions and abandoning its minority-rights policies; Colvin R. de Silva told Ivan the 1978 Constitution was better for minorities than his own of 1972. The JVP had devotion but no study, and should use parliamentary politics to pursue achievable reforms.
පෙරටුගාමී පක්ෂයේ ස්වයං විවේචනය
Amid the decay of every party, Ivan reviews the newly formed Frontline Socialist Party through its 445-page book on the JVP’s path from 1978 to 2012, billed as a self-criticism but really a critique of its parent party. Its young members are committed, he says, but their thinking still lives before the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending with Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book romanticises JVP culture without asking why idealistic youth became executioners in 1988–89. He traces a thread through the JVP’s history: after Wijeweera’s disappointing 273,248 votes in 1982, the party never found a leader the public would accept, backing Rajapaksa in 2005 and Fonseka in 2010 for want of its own candidate — a dilemma rooted in race, caste and religion. The FSP must put knowledge before action.
වාද කරන්නට පෙර ප්රකෘති සිහිය ඇති කරගැනීම වැදගත්ය
Answering Gamini Viyangoda and Jayatilaka Kammallaweera, who accused him of labelling them and of defending the Rajapaksa regime, Ivan restates his thesis: after losing socialism they adopted the ethnic crisis as their cause and lost their judgement when the LTTE fell, as he once feared a coup under Wijeweera’s spell before 1971. He rejects Viyangoda’s claim that he attacked individuals for twenty years and turned to ‘the system’ only to protect Rajapaksa, noting that his ‘Chaura Rajya’ series on reforming the predatory state ran in Ravaya in 2002, before ‘Chaura Rajina’ (2006), and listing earlier articles on system change. He recalls the Kaha Pati (yellow ribbon) campaign of 2000, the all-party talks on his reform draft in Parliament in 2001, and the 2006 Kobbekaduwa round table, and argues that reform must come by consensus, as Mandela achieved.
25 වැනි සමරුව හා ව්යාකූලතා
Ivan reflects on objections, among a few readers and staff, to inviting the President and other leaders to Ravaya’s 25th anniversary. Ravaya’s readers have never held one view, he says: during 1988–89 it refused to use the insurrection to topple the UNP; it helped defeat that government in 1994 but refused to profit from the new one, learning that changing governments does not change the system. The deepest split came over the war against the LTTE, which Ravaya opposed in a way Ivan now calls sometimes unfair and extreme, while he himself saw a just and winnable war; he argues that the UNP obstructed it hoping for regime change, that Prabhakaran and Wijeweera both chose guns over politics, and that the 2010 election left a hatred between the two camps that now blocks reform.
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.
දේශපාලන ක්රමය නිරුවත් කිරීම
Ivan argues that the collapse of the J.R. Jayewardene system, which N.M. Perera called a ‘hotchpotch’ of presidential systems, has only accelerated even under a popular President. Chandrika Kumaratunga seized control of public finance from Parliament and used Sarath N. Silva to break the independence of the judiciary; corruption and politicians’ reliance on local criminals for security did the rest. While Wijeweera and Prabhakaran threatened the country, the public could not see the rot; Prabhakaran’s defeat has stripped the system naked. Ivan lists fifteen recent ‘scenes’, from the Golden Key and Sakvithi collapses to the Tangalle murder of a British tourist, and calls on the President to lead a national reorganisation with all parties.