අධිකරණය හා ව්යවස්ථාව
Two citizens have petitioned the Supreme Court to declare that the failure to appoint the Constitutional Council violates their fundamental rights, and the chief justice has said in open court that nobody can be above the law — naming the president as a respondent. Ivan welcomes the change and says its suddenness is unexplained, because the 17th Amendment has been violated for years and the court knew it.
රැවටිල්ලේ කෙළවර කුමක්ද?
The petition has raised hopes that the Constitutional Council can be won back by court order. Ivan says it is neither the first attempt nor a new problem, and goes to the root: a constitution whose founding philosophy is absolute presidential power cannot be turned into its opposite by an amendment whose philosophy is to limit that power. The court let the 17th Amendment through because the politics of the moment needed it, not because the two philosophies fit.
මොළයෙන් වෙනුවට හදවතින් තර්ක කිරීම
Ivan’s August article on the war and the Tamil people was translated into Tamil and English and answered by Kumar David in the Sunday Island and criticised by Gamini Viyangoda. This is his reply to Kumar David: the LTTE and the JVP, freedom from naked power, the separate state, the Vaddukoddai resolution, the silent revolution, and the difference between pride and emotion.
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.
What Next?
Written after the LTTE’s defeat in May 2009, the piece credits Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa with the victory and turns to what remains: uniting a people divided by race, religion and caste, and settling the ethnic question. Ivan blames the Tamil leaders who first proposed a separate state as much as Prabhakaran, and argues that 1956 could have been handled differently.
දෙමළ සංහාරය ඇත්තක්ද?
Against the claim that the war is a genocide, Ivan sets the arithmetic of the three armed
rebellions the forces have put down. The second JVP insurrection lasted two years and five
months and cost at least fifty thousand lives; the Fourth Eelam War has run three months
longer for perhaps fifteen thousand. He questions the figure of 850,000 Tamils abroad as
evidence of extermination, and notes that fewer than a fifth of the country’s Tamils ever
lived under LTTE rule.
සාකච්ඡා කිරීම හා සටන් කිරීම
Accused at a public forum of helping the government’s war, Ivan answers by setting out
thirty years of his own dealings with power: the twenty-odd statements he has given the CID,
the night J.R. Jayewardene ordered him to drop a column and the month he obeyed before
resuming it, the raid on the Ravaya office five days after he declined President Premadasa’s
invitation, and the meetings with Chandrika Kumaratunga after attacks on journalists.
Journalists, he argues, should be able to telephone anyone in the country; the fault lies
only in misusing the connection.
Can the Political System be changed by way of Court Orders?
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva now rules against the executive, and the public is pleased. Ivan sets this against the court’s record — the stay order on the impeachment motion, the JSC petition, and five years of turning away petitions to implement the 17th Amendment before Sumanasiri Liyanage’s succeeded — and argues that only changing the political system will last.
දාර්ශනික මාක්ස් හා දේශපාලනික මාක්ස්
A reply to Sumanasiri, who holds that Marx the philosopher is not dead. Ivan grants that the world Marx hoped for is more beautiful than liberal democracy, but separates the philosopher from the politician. Drawing on Dmitri Volkogonov’s biographies of Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, drawn from the opened Soviet archives, he argues that attempts to build Marx’s world produced tyranny, likens Pol Pot, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran to those figures, and concludes that capitalism cannot be replaced and must be reformed through liberal democracy, his preferred model being Gandhi’s India.