රටේ දේශපාලන නායකත්වය පිළිබඳ ගැටලුව
A Sunday Times survey of 519 people for the sixtieth anniversary asked which post-independence leader had most capacity to take the country forward. No leader had won the confidence of a majority; D.S. Senanayake came first and even he scored low; Chandrika Kumaratunga drew one per cent. Ivan reads the result as a verdict on what the office does to whoever holds it.
එල්ල වී තිබෙන අභියෝගයට එක්සත්ව මුහුණ දිය යුතුය
The war has entered a new phase and the LTTE has answered by attacking civilians in the south. Ivan distinguishes civilian deaths from air strikes, which may happen, from attacks aimed at civilians, which are chosen — then says the danger now is a second Black July, and that neither suppressing the opposition nor destabilising the government can be justified against it.
60 වසරක නිදහසේ අස්වැන්න
Sixty years on we still blame the British for what we have made of the country, Ivan writes, and we are not ready to ask honestly whether we did it to ourselves. India was worth wealth to the Empire and Ceylon was worth its position; what we inherited was a political system we then steered in a feudal pattern, dividing citizens by race, religion and caste for the convenience of ruling them.
යක්ෂයාට ගිය ජවිපෙ සදාචාරය
Starting from a gift of Li Zhisui’s memoir of Mao, Ivan turns to the morality the JVP claims for itself: the party that says it is the cleanest in the country, and the accounts of extortion from businesses, the sale of party services, and the misuse of money that its own internal quarrel has now brought into the open.
ජනමාධ්ය බිය ගැන්වීම
Threats to journalists used to come from the government; now they come from the government and from gangs. Ivan follows the Rupavahini affair from the attack on a programme producer to the armed group that told another employee’s mother he would be killed, and sets it beside the JVP’s habit of calling violence against ordinary people a campaign against a foreign army.
රට අවුලට යවා බලය අල්ලා ගැනීමට සිහින දැකීම
The JVP is once again pushing the country towards ruin, Ivan writes, and it is using the formula of 1971 — frighten the villages with an invasion that is coming, then offer an armed movement as the answer. Only the enemy has changed: where once it was an American-backed coup, it is now the United Nations and the West preparing to hand Prabhakaran a state.
හොංකොංවල සිදුවූ නිහඬ විප්ලවය
The second part of the Hong Kong argument, and the practical half: Godber’s flight, the independent commission set up in answer to it, the cleaning of the police, the construction industry and the attorney general’s department. A deputy director of prosecutions fled the country and the senior lawyer who helped him got four years. Today complaints against public servants are almost unheard of.
13 වැනි සංශෝධනය ක්රියාත්මක කිරීම
The government has decided to give provincial councils the full powers the 13th Amendment already allows. Ivan calls it arguable but better than doing nothing, and adds what costs nothing and is not being done either: making it possible to deal with state offices in Tamil in the north and east and in the Western and Central provinces, recruiting the staff for it, and rewarding bilingualism.
හොංකොංවලින් උගත හැකි පාඩම් (1)
Hong Kong before 1974 was as rotten as Sri Lanka — a bribe was a condition of getting anything done, including calling the fire brigade. Today its police force is among the cleanest in the world. In the first of two parts Ivan sets out how corruption is structured here instead: what political power is worth, why business invests in politicians rather than in business, and what the country pays for it.
රට තීරණාත්මක තැනක
Ivan puts the decisions facing the country as a numbered list: whether to keep the All Party Representative Committee going and produce a settlement, whether to protect the European trade concession the garment industry depends on, and what the UNP is for if it will not take a far-sighted position on either.