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.
Conscience Benumbed
In this article, Victor Ivan argues that decades of mass violence and rampant political corruption have paralyzed the collective conscience of Sri Lankan society. Drawing heavily on the psychological trauma outlined in Prof. Daya Somasunderam’s book Scarred Minds, Ivan asserts that the psychological damage seen in the Tamil community is reflective of a wider distortion affecting all Sri Lankans—victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike. Using the commercialization and resulting decline of Sri Lankan cricket as an analogy for the state of the nation, the author critiques how governance has become a mechanism for public plunder. Specifically, Ivan highlights the failure of the 17th Amendment, pointing out that constitutional safeguards and independent commissions (such as the Elections, Police, and Bribery Commissions) have been deliberately sabotaged or stalled by the President, with little to no resistance from the judiciary, the political opposition, or a benumbed public.
ජනතා විමුක්ති පෙරමුණට සිදුවූයේ කුමක්ද?
Rebutting Tilvin Silva’s claim of success, Ivan uses vote figures since 1994 to show the JVP lost 47 per cent of its 2001 vote in the local elections, worst in Colombo, Puttalam and Kalutara, which he blames on its nationalism and its alliance with the President. He traces how Chandrika Kumaratunga may steer the party through Somawansa Amarasinghe, whose relative Sirisena Cooray is said to have enabled his 1989 escape, citing General Cecil Waidyaratne.
සෝමවංශ අමරසිංහ ජවිපෙ රැගෙන යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
Ivan questions Somawansa Amarasinghe’s fitness to lead the JVP. He recounts Amarasinghe’s arrest in the botched 1971 plan to seize Sirimavo Bandaranaike and his switch from anti- to pro-Wijeweera views in prison, and cites Vas Tillekeratne’s statement on Iraqi funding. He asks how Amarasinghe alone escaped in 1989, possibly helped by his relative Sirisena Cooray, notes the JVP’s shifts towards the PA, and criticises a leadership drawn from his home district of Kalutara.
The Richard factor in the FMM
A mention of Richard de Zoysa in an earlier article, questioning the purpose of a government photographic exhibition, has become a great controversy. This is Ivan’s answer to it, and the most personally exposed thing he wrote in the Sunday Times.
රිචඩ් සොයිසා ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්…
Replying to C.A. Chandraprema, an Island editorial, Justice Minister Batty Weerakoon and a state radio campaign against the Alliance for Democracy, Ivan explains his earlier remark on Richard de Zoysa. He recounts what a senior police investigator and a close friend told him: that de Zoysa was an active JVP supporter whose borrowed house sheltered Somawansa Amarasinghe, and that he was translating Wijeweera’s book on Eelam when abducted. He insists the murder was unjustifiable, discusses the class dimension of its prominence, and says his views are his own, not the Free Media Movement’s.
JVP terror to the fore
The government is marking the anniversary of Vijaya Kumaratunga’s assassination as a general commemoration of those killed by the JVP, with a costly travelling exhibition and fresh legal action against those involved in the second insurrection. Ivan’s objection is not to the remembering.
JVP legacy that of Pol Pot and Prabhakaran
Answering JVP writers who now praise the party’s programme and compare its 1989 hartal to that of 1953, Ivan argues the 1989 hartal was enforced by killing, likens the JVP’s record to Pol Pot and Prabhakaran, and dismisses its manifesto as unworkable. He allows that a party can reform, but sees no sign of repentance.
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.