විධායක ජනාධිපති ක්රමය ගැන තවදුරටත්
Ranil Wickremesinghe has written an affectionate essay for J.R. Jayewardene’s 103rd birthday while his party’s official position is that Jayewardene’s creation should be abolished. Ivan takes the essay apart against the record — the referendum, the pardon of Gonawala Sunil, the 1982 district council election run by the ruling party rather than the commissioner, and a bribery commission that in thirty years has convicted nobody.
මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂගේ හතර අවුරුද්ද
The president may call an election as soon as four years of his term are done — a power added to the constitution by amendment for the benefit of the incumbent and now enjoyed by all of them. Ivan takes stock of the four years: the LTTE gone with not even a ghost of Prabhakaran left, the whole territory in the state’s hands, and the question of whether the respect of opponents as well as supporters can be won.
පුවත්පත් මණ්ඩල ක්රමය නැවත ඇති කිරීම
The Press Council was left dormant in 2002 so that the industry could regulate itself, and is now being revived. Ivan sets out what is wrong with the law — registration of every owner and editor, renewable yearly — and what is wrong with the self-regulation that replaced it, and concludes that the media organisations’ only course is to negotiate a single institution in which the government also has a share.
මහින්ද කොයිබටද?
Whether by luck, practical sense or sheer resolve, Ivan writes, Mahinda Rajapaksa will enter
history as the leader who turned modern Sri Lankan politics. But defeating Prabhakaran
militarily is not enough: he must be defeated politically as well, which means bringing the
country’s Tamils to accept that life within the Sri Lankan state is better and fairer than
life in his separate one. A great leader is not satisfied with half a greatness.
කැරලිකරුවන් අභිබවා රනිල් ජයගැනීම
Ranil Wickremesinghe has now put down the third revolt against him, and Ivan explains why he
was always going to. The party constitution gives its leader the same absolute power
Sirimavo Bandaranaike used to survive seventeen years out of office — though it cost her the
premiership when the party finally won. The rebels had no agreed leader, and Ranil set
Sajith Premadasa’s name against S.B. Dissanayake’s until neither mattered. They should have
gone after the constitution, not the man.
එක්සත් ජාතික පක්ෂයේ අර්බුදය
Ivan argues that the UNP’s decline is not Ranil Wickremesinghe’s doing but the working of
the system the party itself built: J.R. Jayewardene designed a machine that would not change
hands, and since 1994 it has kept his party out for fifteen years. Party constitutions
mirror the national one — the leader is above the document, as the president is — and the
party is caught in a trap of its own making.
පරාජයට බිය නොවන රනිල්
Ivan reads the revolt against Ranil Wickremesinghe at Sirikotha as an illustration of the
political system’s absurdity: a party with no constitutional means of removing its own
leader, in which the leader holds the same absolute power over the party that the president
holds over the country. He imagines Ranil’s arithmetic — his uncle reached the top at
seventy-one — and concludes that until the party gives itself a civilised constitution,
nothing it does about the man will matter.
Political Funds- The Root of corruption
Ivan argues that the absence of any law on party and election funding is the main source of corruption in Sri Lanka. He compares the spending limits and disclosure rules of the United States, France and India with Sri Lanka’s single, unenforced assets law, and describes how candidates repay their backers from public resources.
දේශපාලන අරමුදල් හෙවත් දූෂණයේ මුදුන් මුල
Ivan puts the cost of a Sri Lankan presidential campaign at between 500 million and a
billion rupees and shows that no law governs where any of it comes from, J.R. Jayewardene
having repealed the pre-1978 controls. Setting the American, French and Indian regimes
against the Sri Lankan vacuum, he argues that parties financed by a few men with black money
must repay them from public resources, and calls this the taproot of the country’s
corruption.
හැරී ගුණතිලක
An obituary for Air Marshal Harry Gunetilleke, who died at seventy-nine. Ivan writes about how honest a man holding office can be, tells the story of the ban a president placed on him and how he had it lifted, and records that having a son as air force commander did not quiet him: he went on saying what he thought in public until he died.