Can Sri Lanka be saved?
Neither the government nor the opposition, Victor Ivan argues, but a third option: he describes what the Punarudaya Movement has actually tried in villages and meeting halls, and what it learned.
Barring Nagananda Kodituwakku from practicing law
The Supreme Court has barred a public-interest litigator and prospective presidential candidate from practising for three years. Victor Ivan weighs Nagananda Kodituwakku’s record — and the record of those he fought.
Playing with history
Answering a published reply to his own column, Victor Ivan sets out what the record actually shows about the decline of the Raja Rata, the British period and the uses to which Sri Lankan history is put.
Alcoholic beverages and ganja
Victor Ivan begins with arrack and ends with ganja, tracing how liquor built schools and fortunes in colonial Ceylon and how prohibition-minded policy since has served neither health nor honesty.
Making way for a people’s constitution
A numbered case for taking constitution-making out of the hands of a Parliament that Victor Ivan judges incapable of passing an ordinary Act, let alone founding a state.
Exploitation of rural women
Microfinance, invented to lift the very poor, has become in Sri Lanka a machine for stripping them. Victor Ivan reports from Polonnaruwa and Vavuniya on rural women trapped by collateral-free loans they never used to earn.
What went wrong with Sri Lanka? (Part II)
Sri Lanka’s independence movement, Victor Ivan argues, was never a movement for liberation — and the elite that inherited the state kept caste and ethnicity as instruments of politics rather than dismantling them.
What went wrong with Sri Lanka?
Seventy-one years after independence, countries that were behind Sri Lanka have overtaken it. Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the colonial inheritance, the uses made of ancient history, and the poverty of the country’s intellectual life.
Crisis of the Constitution
The 19th Amendment stripped the president of executive power but left him elected as though he still held it. Victor Ivan calls the result a country without a working constitution — and warns against going to the polls before fixing it.
Understanding Sri Lanka through education and agriculture
Rote learning from Grade 1 to Advanced Level; paddy land worked at a loss; wild animals destroying two-fifths of the crop. Victor Ivan uses education and agriculture to show how far the country’s thinking has fallen behind.