ස්මෝල්, මැතිවරණ කොමසාරිස් හා පළාත් සභා ඡන්ද
Following responses to his column on W.J.T. Small, Ivan asks the Commissioner of Elections to follow Small’s example in the provincial council elections. Before the executive presidency, he writes, elections were civil: strict spending limits applied, and courts unseated winners who broke the law, as in the 1947 petition against T.B. Ilangaratne. After 1977 the contest turned savage, and the 1994 People’s Alliance government continued the same greedy system rather than ending it.
පිල්ලේගේ නිරීක්ෂණ
Whatever Sri Lanka gained by inviting Navi Pillay, Ivan argues, it lost through a media campaign that painted her as a blood-drinking demon and a minister’s lewd offer to marry her — insults recalling Premadasa’s jibe at Indira Gandhi. The government undoes its own good work, as in the North, and rules through a giant among dwarfs, unlike Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s or even J.R.’s cabinets. Pillay spoke within the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which Sri Lanka signed; her warning of drift towards authoritarianism is one Sri Lankans themselves can see.
ජනතා විමුක්ති පෙරමුණේ භූමිකාව
The editorial says the JVP aims to ally with favoured SLFP figures, derail the peace process with the President’s help and use the resulting disorder to form a government it can steer, much as Sirimavo Bandaranaike and N.M. Perera did in 1964, with Mangala Samaraweera as go-between. It argues the JVP offers the SLFP little beyond votes, and warns that the power struggle may push Prabhakaran to prepare for war or to claim that only a separate state is left.
සමසමාජ මග හා ජවිපෙ මග
The piece compares the JVP’s ‘probationary’ pact with Chandrika Kumaratunga’s government in 2001 with the LSSP’s 1964 coalition with Sirimavo Bandaranaike. It sets out the LSSP’s internal debate, the talents of its leaders such as N.M. Perera, and its ideological fit with the SLFP, and contrasts these with the JVP’s lack of debate and weak rationale. Both governments, it notes, then fell to parliamentary defections, in 1964 over the Press Bill.