Dismissing Ranil
Answering the critics of ‘Ranil’s destiny’. Victor Ivan asks who else was available for the presidency, weighs the charges against Wickremesinghe one by one, and returns to the shortage of mature leaders.
Lawful public uprising! (2)
Part two turns to why liberalism never took here. Victor Ivan sets the JVP and the LTTE side by side as movements that drove their own communities into racism.
Reawakening of Tamil society
The Pothuvil to Polikandy march reads to Victor Ivan as a Tamil society waking up. He sets it beside the two Sinhala insurrections and the failure, since 1948, to build a nation any minority could belong to.
Understanding core issues: The key for solution
Answering readers who asked for a solution, Victor Ivan goes back to the core issues — the limits of the independence Sri Lanka was given, the disenfranchisements that followed, and the nation never built.
Understanding the puzzles of history
Victor Ivan goes back to the chronicles: how ethnic groups and religions formed on the island, what the South Indian invasions actually did, and how monks writing history shaped the way Sri Lankans think now.
Election, the transformative opportunity
Every candidate has a manifesto and none has a vision. Victor Ivan reads the campaign against the religious revivals of the nineteenth century and the failure, ever since, to build one nation.
The State and the bulldozer
A state that knows only how to bulldoze: Victor Ivan runs the argument through garbage, schools, paddy land, caste and fake passports, and concludes that structural reform must come before any election.
What went wrong with Sri Lanka? (Part II)
Sri Lanka’s independence movement, Victor Ivan argues, was never a movement for liberation — and the elite that inherited the state kept caste and ethnicity as instruments of politics rather than dismantling them.
Understanding the root cause of the crisis
The collapse Victor Ivan sees around him did not begin in October 2018. He traces it to the failure, from independence onward, to build a single nation out of Sri Lanka’s ethnic, caste and religious divisions.
ඊළඟ මුවහම මුස්ලිම්වරුන්ද?
Ivan warns that a handful of extremist groups acting in the name of Buddhism, apparently with state protection, are pushing the country towards bloodshed again. Black July 1983 internationalised the Tamil question and fed the northern insurgency; turning on the Muslims now would isolate Sri Lanka in a world with a vast Muslim population. He traces the Muslims’ history in the island, their ties with Sinhala castes such as the Salagama noted by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Ralph Pieris, and argues that envy of Muslim success in trade lies behind the hostility.