Who Wins?
Victor Ivan reads the JVP’s place in the Alliance government as a third attempt at the ambition two rebellions failed to deliver. The 1971 rising, aimed at simultaneous attacks on police stations across the Sinhala areas, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s government put down in days; the second, seventeen years later, killed its opponents methodically and came close to power before the Premadasa government crushed it. Having abandoned armed struggle in 1994 and entered parliament in 2001, the party now holds a share of power it means to convert into the whole. Ivan credits it with persuading the President to seize three ministries and dissolve a parliament the UNP controlled, against her own promise and at the cost of her party, and with using state power and state media unlawfully in the campaign that followed. Each then hoped to use the other and neither can now escape: the JVP cannot leave, the President cannot sack it, and both must ridicule the other to keep their own credibility. Meanwhile the Alliance is bound to a JVP economic programme — state sector, self-reliance, a mixed economy, no privatisation, no interim administration for the north-east — that Ivan thinks belongs to 1970 and has no room in the world today. He expects her to end up playing her father’s part.
Silence Must End
This article addresses Sri Lanka’s intellectual stagnation, arguing that high literacy rates mask a deeply backward social consciousness starved of meaningful public debate. Contrasting Sri Lanka’s superficial modernism with Europe’s Enlightenment and India’s inclusive movement under Mahatma Gandhi, the author criticizes Sri Lanka’s past reform attempts for fragmenting society along racial, religious, and class lines. The text delivers a sharp warning to the educated class, asserting that their persistent silence and fear of controversy create a dangerous vacuum—one historically filled by violent extremists like Wijeweera and Prabhakaran—and calls on intellectuals to fulfill their civic duty by sparking dynamic social discussion across all areas of national life.
Democratization of the Country
This article explores the deeper socio-political fractures in Sri Lanka, arguing that the nation’s violent conflicts have been driven as much by caste oppression as by ethnic divisions. The author points out that both Prabhakaran in the North and Wijeweera in the South led armed rebellions that fundamentally challenged the entrenched dominance of the Vellala and Govigama castes. Highlighting historical examples of political exclusion based on caste—such as C.P. de Silva being denied party leadership—the article contends that Sri Lanka’s rigid political framework fails to accommodate marginalized voices. Ultimately, the author calls for a new, flexible constitution that guarantees true democratic participation and protects all minority groups from the tyranny of the majority.
Caste oppression and youth unrest
Writing on the twenty-second anniversary of the 1971 rebellion, Victor Ivan argues that caste oppression has been an underrated driver of youth revolt in both the south and the north. Drawing on Gananath Obeyesekera, Janice Jiggins and Bryce Ryan’s Caste in Modern Ceylon, he shows that JVP strength concentrated in areas where oppressed castes — Wahumpura, Bathgama, Nekathi — were dense, a pattern the Presidential Commission on Youth Unrest also recorded. These groups entered the capitalist economy late, gained education late, and remain under-represented in Parliament. Ivan extends the analysis to the Tamil militancy, reading it as a struggle against Vellala domination as much as for national freedom, and suggests that both movements refuse to disarm because returning to democratic politics would mean returning to high-caste dominance. A Ravaya reader survey finding the JVP still esteemed by a tenth of Sinhala society leads him to warn of room for a third uprising.