Plunder of public property by rulers
Victor Ivan sets out how the plunder of public property was built into the state: laws left unenforced after 1977, permits handed to relatives and cronies, and MPs unseated by the courts then reappointed by their leaders.
Putrefaction and end
With the presidential election set for December, Victor Ivan argues that every major leader has an interest in keeping the country unstable until polling day — and that none of them will touch the reforms that matter.
Avoiding essential reforms
The surface fire is out; the fire under the ashes is not. Victor Ivan compares Sri Lanka’s failure to build a nation with Gandhi’s approach in India, and asks why the necessary reforms are still being avoided.
Sri Lanka needs urgent surgery!
Sri Lanka needs emergency surgery, not an election, Victor Ivan writes — and he is careful to say what he means by surgery, what diagnosis must come first, and what the next president will actually be able to do.
The crisis and constitutional violations
Every branch of the state has broken the Constitution, Victor Ivan argues — and he traces the habit from the disenfranchisement of the plantation Tamils under Soulbury to the amendments that followed 1977.
Overcoming wretchedness
What the country needs now is not an election but structural change, Victor Ivan argues — and he describes trying, and failing, to get that point onto the agenda of a meeting of party leaders.
Sri Lanka: Out of the frying pan into the fire
Victor Ivan looks at what the Easter attacks have done to the Muslim community and to the state’s intelligence services, and asks whether a country that has swum in blood for three decades can escape the cycle.
Black Easter
The first column after the Easter Sunday bombings. Victor Ivan sets the attacks against a longer record of political murder and asks what kind of state failed to see them coming.
Wounding the social psyche
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles by Lasantha Wickrematunge’s daughter opens Victor Ivan’s account of the wounds left on Sri Lankan society by abductions, disappearances and unpunished political murder.
The reality of Nagananda’s Constitution
Nagananda Kodituwakku’s ‘autochthonous’ constitution would let every incoming ruler write his own, Victor Ivan argues — a recipe for constitutional chaos dressed up as home-grown independence.