Self-ruination or salvation
The country hangs on a cord braided from Gotabaya and Ranil — ugly, absurd, and the only one there is. Victor Ivan asks whose fault it was and what escape would actually require.
Opening doors for reforms
With the President and Prime Minister apparently willing, Victor Ivan sets out the reform plan itself — numbered, sequenced, and to be finished with a referendum inside three years.
Anarchy is more dangerous than dictatorship
Victor Ivan recalls telling an audience the country would go bankrupt, and Mangala Samaraweera rising to accept it. The column argues that anarchy is a worse danger than dictatorship.
Youth struggle; what could be the end?
Ranil Wickremesinghe is appointed Prime Minister and Victor Ivan calls it a good omen. He also tells the youth movement plainly that its slogan cost it the reforms it could have won.
Revisit the strategies
A working document rather than an essay: Victor Ivan’s numbered proposal for an interim administration and an interim constitution, written for a forum of people’s representatives.
Anarchy must be averted
Blackouts, queues and no plan. Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is constitutionally primitive, and that an interim constitution is the only way to keep the collapse from becoming anarchy.
The struggle of the youth, what will be the end?
The New Year dawned with the Central Bank declaring bankruptcy. Victor Ivan puts the hard question to the protesters: if GotaGoHome succeeds, what exactly will have changed?
The mass uprising: What could be the outcome?
Written a week after Mirihana. Victor Ivan reads the protest movement as a direct democratic uprising and asks what it can actually win, beyond removing one man.
More about the solution for Sri Lanka’s current crisis
Radio frequencies are public property given away for nothing, and MPs are traders in the state they govern. Victor Ivan uses both to argue that a balance-of-payments fix alone will change nothing.
Overcoming the crisis
A programme in two phases: go to the IMF, bring the Government into a reform process, pass an interim constitution, and complete the new one by referendum. Written as the queues were forming.