අධිවේග මාර්ග හා දැක්මේ තිබෙන පුංචිකම
Recalling Lalith Athulathmudali’s dream of an expressway joining Hambantota and Jaffna through Colombo, Ivan contrasts the British road and rail network, the best in South Asia at independence, with the neglect that followed, as J.R. Jayewardene poured money into an airline against Lee Kuan Yew’s advice. The Southern Expressway is fast, he says, but serves the car-owning rich; built over a modernised double-track railway it would have needed no land acquisition and served the poor too. On his reckoning it will take two centuries to repay.
බොරුව හා රැවටිල්ල ජාතික ලක්ෂණයක්ද?
Ivan asks whether deceit is a national habit, and finds it at every turn of modern history: D.S. Senanayake’s staged ‘farmers’ and the governor-generalship promised to Lord Soulbury, the 1962 ‘gin-and-tonic’ coup plot, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only opportunism, and John D’Oyly’s bloodless capture of Kandy in 1815, whose native helpers’ descendants became the independence elite. Drawing on Marshall Singer, Henpitagedara Gnanaseeha and Robert Knox, he argues that leaders and people have deceived each other on language and religion until the country fell into an abyss.
ලේ තැවරුණු නිදහසේ හැටපස් වසර
On the 65th anniversary of independence, Ivan argues that Sri Lanka never met the two conditions a nation-state needed: a united nation and a democratic political society. Contrasting India’s mass freedom struggle and three-year constituent assembly with Ceylon’s bloodless, deferential transfer of power, he recalls caste and religion used against A.E. Goonesinha, E.W. Perera and Arunachalam, and Oliver Goonetilleke’s manipulation of the Soulbury Commission. Each constitution since, culminating in the executive presidency, has deepened the distortion.
දහතුනේ අවුල
To win India’s support against the LTTE, President Rajapaksa promised a ’13-plus’ political solution, and Tamil leaders, the UNP and the old Left now demand he keep it, while the JHU, JVP and NFF oppose it. Ivan argues that the President’s doubts are not unreasonable, because the ethnic question is one expression of a larger failure of the political system. He traces how Tamil demands grew from modest regional councils in the Bandaranaike–Chelvanayakam and Senanayake–Chelvanayakam pacts to the 1976 separate-state resolution, the 1977 mandate, Black July, the Thimpu principles and the Indo-Lanka Accord, and says the provincial council system was hastily designed under LTTE pressure. He proposes instead village councils like India’s panchayats, district councils (with a provincial council for the North if needed), a smaller Parliament and a Senate.
මහගමසේකර ප්‍රහේලිකාව හා අර්බුදයට තිබෙන අර්ථකථනයේ දුගීභාවය
Mahagama Sekera was an artist the country loved and respected, of the first rank in several branches of art at once, and the authenticity in his work was the artistic expression of the authenticity in his life. Ivan had a puzzle about him he could not settle for years: why the statue of him at the junction where you enter his village had been attacked, several times, by somebody.
අනුරුද්ධ රත්වත්ත
Anuruddha has died, and as a man who was close to him for a time Ivan thinks it important to set down a note about him. What follows is a personal account, including the plain observation that neither Anuruddha nor Chandrika appears to have had full confidence in the other when she was brought into the SLFP.
රාජපක්ෂ පාලනයේ හත් අවුරුද්ද
Mahinda Rajapaksa can be counted the most argued-about and the most powerful head of state Sri Lanka has produced since independence; before him that place belonged to J.R. Jayewardene. Five sections follow: social and family background, power and resolve, the lust for power, importance and power, and where it went wrong.
විරුද්ධ පක්ෂ හා ආණ්ඩු පක්ෂ දේශපාලනයේ ශ්‍රාස්ත්‍රීය දුගීභාවය
Ivan opens with a telephone conversation with an educated man of some standing inside the UNP who is himself a subject of argument there, and the question he put to him. What follows is an account of the intellectual poverty on both sides, of the deceiving of party members, of family politics, and of the limits of the forward vision on offer.
සරත් නන්ද සිල්වා හා සමාජ පාදඩකරණය
The Sunday Leader editor Frederica Jansz called the former chief justice a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and his long reply appeared in that paper at the weekend — answering not all her charges but only the few he could interpret to his own advantage. This is Ivan’s account of the rest.
දූෂණයට එරෙහිව හා තොරතුරු අයිතිය වෙනුවෙන් කරන සටනේ අවුල
India’s anti-corruption movement, and the satyagraha Anna Hazare carried out to bring the struggle to a logical end, finished by winning the object they had set — an independent anti-corruption institution under a public ombudsman. It has not been discussed enough in Sri Lanka, Ivan writes, and it can be counted the largest popular revolution in India since Gandhi’s.