හිරගෙදර කතන්දරය
Eighteen months after his first piece on prisons, Ivan returns to the subject in far greater detail. He calls Sri Lanka’s prisons a kingdom for corrupt officers, a heaven for a few rich inmates and a hell for the poor majority. Prisoners receive less than half their ration, cooked without spices. Poor inmates sell their meals for cigarettes and wear filthy, reused clothing, while rich ones buy better food, poplin uniforms, beds, and milk and eggs prescribed by complicit doctors. He describes the ritual beating every new prisoner gets at the gate, and the “poriyal”, in which thirty or forty guards beat a man to the edge of death. He cites a Judicial Medical Officer, Chandra Amarasekara, who testified that one such killing was the worst beating he had ever seen. Guards run gambling dens and liquor and drug trades, and for a bribe they arrange sexual access to young prisoners. Ivan sets out five reforms: an adequate diet, which he says April insurgent prisoners proved possible when they ran some prison kitchens; clean clothing laundered in Welikada’s own machines; higher wages for prisoners; relief from overcrowding and water shortages; and a civilian inspection committee. He calls first for an independent commission into actual prison conditions.
ගොවි ණය ප්රශ්නය විසඳීමට අදහසක්
Ivan takes up the government’s plan to overhaul agricultural credit after farmers failed to repay 73 percent of the loans issued for the last Maha season. He draws on a 1972 Central Bank sample survey and the 1969–70 socio-economic survey. Low income, he argues, is the root of the defaults, and nearly half of rural families live below a “dark line” of Rs. 200 a month. Most of the families trapped there are ande sharecroppers: in Hambantota, 83 percent of tenant borrowers defaulted, against 33 percent of owner-cultivators. In Kurunegala it cost a tenant Rs. 27.68 to produce a bushel of paddy that the state bought for Rs. 18, because rent swallowed so much of the harvest. Cutting off their credit would collapse output on 43 percent of paddy land, while continuing to lend means permanent losses. He concludes that freeing tenants from rent by transferring their land to them would cost the state far less than the defaults, and that the cost could be recovered.
වැඩිපුර වී ලබාගන්නට නව උපාය මාර්ගයක්
Ivan frames the 1974 food-production drive as a front in a wider struggle between the “progressive” United Front government and reactionary forces he describes as turning fascist. He notes that the Maha harvest beat its target by 14 percent, yet the Paddy Marketing Board bought only half its quota, while most of the crop went to black-market traders. Raising the guaranteed price four times in seventeen months has failed: traders outbid the state each time, and every increase pushes up the price of the urban workers’ rice ration. Returning to the proposal in his May article, he argues that the state should transfer all tenanted paddy land to its cultivators. Owners would be compensated, and tenants would repay the cost in paddy delivered to the Board instead of rent to landlords. That would bring the quarter of the national harvest now lost to rent into public hands, raise yields, settle long-running tenancy disputes, and turn sharecroppers into what he calls an anti-fascist rural force.
හිරගෙදර ‘පෝරියල්’ නවතීද?
Writing as a prisoner under a pseudonym, Ivan gives an insider’s account of life in Sri Lanka’s prisons, which he says still run on colonial lines. He describes guards who use the baton as a cure-all, and the “poriyal”, a collective beating that has killed some prisoners. He shows how more than half the food ration meant for inmates ends up with officers, their families and the prison canteen. He also exposes a contraband trade in cigarettes, arrack and ganja run through guards’ oversized pockets, and an extortion racket in which officers collect money from prisoners’ homes and keep half. Ivan welcomes the new Commissioner of Prisons and his policy of managing prisoners psychologically rather than by force. He urges an independent panel with free access to prisoners, the restoration of prison education suspended after April 1971, and reform of a colonial system that holds everyone from debtors to “politically misguided ultra-left youth”.
කෘෂිකර්ම අර්බුදය සහ තරුණ ප්රශ්නය
Writing from prison under a pseudonym, Ivan traces Sri Lanka’s agrarian crisis back to colonial land seizures, which left most rural families with too little land to live on. Drawing on the Kandyan Peasantry Commission and the Patha Dumbara review, he shows how land fragmentation, tenancy, debt and mortgage drove both owner-cultivators and sharecroppers deeper into poverty. Without industry to absorb them, rural families invested their hopes in educating their children, only to see those children join a growing army of the educated unemployed. Ivan argues that this unemployment lies at the root of the youth unrest of his time. He urges the government to run its food-production campaign in a way that answers the youth question too, suggesting this could win over even the young people who had turned against the state.
සහලින් රට ස්වයංපෝෂිත කරන්න රජයට යෝජනාවක්
Writing from prison under a pseudonym, Ivan argues that Sri Lanka cannot become self-sufficient in rice while nearly half its paddy land is worked by sharecroppers who surrender up to half their harvest to absentee landlords. Drawing on a 1972 cost-of-production survey and the Patha Dumbara study, he shows that tenant farmers are left in debt after paying rent, and that most landlords are estate owners, traders and salaried employees for whom paddy rent is only a side income. He proposes that the state transfer all tenanted land to the farmers who work it, compensate the owners, and recover the cost through paddy delivered to the Paddy Marketing Board. He argues this would secure the rice ration, raise yields, and free some 450,000 tenant families from what he calls feudal bondage.