Person: S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike

හොංකොංවලින් උගත හැකි පාඩම් (1)

Hong Kong before 1974 was as rotten as Sri Lanka — a bribe was a condition of getting anything done, including calling the fire brigade. Today its police force is among the cleanest in the world. In the first of two parts Ivan sets out how corruption is structured here instead: what political power is worth, why business invests in politicians rather than in business, and what the country pays for it.

The Future is Uncertain

Victor Ivan finds the President immobilised. He cannot abandon the JVP after the support it gave him at the presidential election, yet dropping it would mean placing full faith in Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom he does not trust; and a president dependent on the JVP is trapped in its framework, as Chandrika Kumaratunga discovered. Neither party can transform the other, so nothing moves without the JVP’s consent. Ivan sees the same deadlock between the government and the LTTE, each blocked by India — which will permit neither the oppression of Tamils in the north and east nor a separate state. He puts the negotiating gap in a simile: the LTTE asked for tens of thousands of buns, was offered thousands, refused, and is now invited to the table for one. A government proposing decentralisation within a unitary framework is offering less than the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1958, and cannot raise the offer while the JVP and Hela Urumaya hold it in place. With no negotiated route left, Ivan warns the LTTE may settle accounts by war and may seek borders drawn by community — an attack on the Sinhalese of the East making it impossible for Tamils to live in the south, and opening the way to massacre and mutual slaughter.

විමුක්තිගේ භාෂා අවුල

In the middle of a political crisis the President has shown off her son Vimukthi, perhaps to test demand for the ‘prince’. His remarks recall how his grandfather S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike tangled the dog question with the language question; the editorial laments a country forever lost in empty arguments while it cannot even agree when to hold elections.

The Mahinda – Anura Equation

The President has named Mahinda Rajapaksa her party’s presidential candidate and her own brother its prime ministerial candidate, though only the first nomination was asked for — and done while an amendment making her SLFP leader for life was being introduced. Victor Ivan reads it as a chess move of some cunning: in every sequence of elections, a defeated Mahinda loses even the seat he holds while Anura Bandaranaike emerges as leader of the opposition, and family control of the party survives the defeat. Behind it sits the unresolved question of whether the presidential election falls in 2005 or 2006, and a chain of unanswerable questions about what the Elections Commissioner will decide, whether the President will seek a Supreme Court interpretation first, and what either will do if they disagree. Ivan then turns to the parties themselves, arguing neither main party is democratic — the SLFP run by one family, the UNP by several — and traces the pattern of leaders seeking to escape their term limits: Jayewardene collecting undated resignation letters from a five-sixths majority and dreaming of a third term until Premadasa stood against him, Kumaratunga collecting the same letters from twenty-three deputy ministers in 2000 with the judiciary’s support. Her dreams end, he concludes, only if Mahinda can become a Premadasa.

අර්බුදය ගමන් ගනිමින් තිබෙන්නේ කොතැනටද?

For all her mistakes, Ivan argues, Chandrika Kumaratunga may enter history as the leader who finally stood up to the Sinhala racist and religious extremists that every leader before her, her father included, obeyed. He then weighs her options as her term runs out: retirement, dissolution with the risk of impeachment, or giving up the presidency to keep the party and the opposition leadership, and what each would mean for Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Who Wins?

Victor Ivan reads the JVP’s place in the Alliance government as a third attempt at the ambition two rebellions failed to deliver. The 1971 rising, aimed at simultaneous attacks on police stations across the Sinhala areas, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government put down in days; the second, seventeen years later, killed its opponents methodically and came close to power before the Premadasa government crushed it. Having abandoned armed struggle in 1994 and entered parliament in 2001, the party now holds a share of power it means to convert into the whole. Ivan credits it with persuading the President to seize three ministries and dissolve a parliament the UNP controlled, against her own promise and at the cost of her party, and with using state power and state media unlawfully in the campaign that followed. Each then hoped to use the other and neither can now escape: the JVP cannot leave, the President cannot sack it, and both must ridicule the other to keep their own credibility. Meanwhile the Alliance is bound to a JVP economic programme — state sector, self-reliance, a mixed economy, no privatisation, no interim administration for the north-east — that Ivan thinks belongs to 1970 and has no room in the world today. He expects her to end up playing her father’s part.

අනුරගේ රස කතා

Anura Bandaranaike has changed his tune about succeeding his sister as the alliance’s presidential candidate. In sections on the constitutional amendment, Chandrika’s tricks, a Ranil who belongs to neither world, and a thunderbolt striking the temple of justice, Ivan argues that the state needs full reform, not reform to save one person from irrelevance, and above all an independent judiciary.

නිසරු නායකයින් නිසා වැනසෙන රටක්

Prompted by commemorations of J.R. Jayewardene, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike and Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Ivan sets out what makes a great leader and assesses every head of government since independence, from D.S. Senanayake to Chandrika Kumaratunga, finding none who qualifies. Contrasting Nehru, Mahathir Mohamad, Chandrababu Naidu and Lee Kuan Yew, who wrote books setting out their vision, he blames the lack of internal party democracy, family dominance and the belief that a leader must be Sinhala, Buddhist and Govigama.