තුන්වෙනි බලවේගයක් රටට අවශ්යයි
Ivan accuses Sri Lanka of spending its scarce capital on the trappings of development — televisions, washing machines, imported luxury foods, new cars — while people die of malaria, diarrhoea and malnutrition, Colombo’s water carries disease, and patients in remote areas are carried for miles on men’s shoulders. He sees the same “development” eroding the national character, from mothers selling infants to the exodus of women to the Middle East. With neither government nor opposition willing to act, he calls on thoughtful people, and the writers and artists already resisting in the cultural field, to build an honest third political force.
සම්ප්රදායික වාමාංශික ව්යාපාරයේ පරිහානිය හා ජනතා විමුක්ති පෙරමුණ (2)
Concluding his two-part essay, Ivan contrasts the JVP’s leaders with the founders of the traditional left: rural, poor and educated only in Sinhala, drawn to Marxism by hardship rather than conviction, and already showing the self-interest they once condemned. He explains the JVP’s growth through four advantages — a generation that knows nothing of the old left’s work and still lives on the memory of 1971, an organisation suited to rural youth, quiet roots among castes the old left once championed, and Marxism’s shift from the town to the village — but warns that the social forces gathered around it are not stable enough to justify its leaders’ confidence.
සම්ප්රදායික වාමාංශික ව්යාපාරයේ පරිහානිය (1)
In the first of two articles, Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s traditional left is in decline and asks whether its red flag is passing to the JVP, which he calls its own disobedient, foolish son. He traces the left’s high point to 1935–1953, culminating in the 1953 hartal, then names three causes of its fall: its English-educated founders never made Marxism indigenous, ceding the ground of national culture to Bandaranaike in 1956; endless factional infighting; and the waning appeal of Marxism itself among intellectuals, who now see that the “new world” it promised reproduces the old.