මැන්ඩෙලාගෙන් උගත යුතු පාඩම්
Nelson Mandela, Ivan writes, is second in greatness only to Gandhi, and in nation-building he surpassed him: he united two races divided for centuries by hatred, making whites part of the nation rather than overthrowing them, then left power when his work was done. Both leaders refused to hate their oppressors and kept Marxism within their movements without becoming its prisoners. Sri Lanka’s divisions of race, religion, caste and class are far smaller than South Africa’s; what it lacks is an ideological movement that changes attitudes, which no constitution alone can do.
සිංහල-බෞද්ධ මනස තේරුම් ගැනීම
Responding to Kusal Perera’s ‘In Search of the New Man’, Ivan revisits two debates: Newton Gunasinghe’s great and little traditions, which suggest Sinhala cultural narrowness belongs to the era of decline rather than all history, and Sarachchandra’s claim, contested by Martin Wickramasinghe, that Buddhism does not see art as purifying. Europe escaped a similar world-denial through the Renaissance; Sri Lanka’s revivals, independence movement and parties never produced one. Every movement from Dharmapala and Bandaranaike to Wijeweera and the JHU has pandered to the Sinhala-Buddhist mind, shaped by an island that kept its identity against India, rather than changing it.
අන්තෝ ජටා බහි ජටා
Ivan asks why more than a hundred thousand deaths in two insurrections have left so little mark on Sri Lankan thought and literature, recalling conversations with Simon Navagattegama and Ediriweera Sarachchandra and a sharp exchange with Sugathapala de Silva. He argues that caste, not only race and class, drove both rebellions: Wijeweera and Prabhakaran came from parallel non-dominant castes and drew their foot soldiers from oppressed ones. Only Premadasa grasped this, and the chance to rebuild society after the LTTE’s defeat has been squandered.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (2)
Ivan argues that British rule transformed Ceylon’s economy and state but left its thinking feudal. Europe’s Renaissance and liberal philosophers — Copernicus to Locke and Mill — remade how people thought as well as how they lived; India’s Congress, under Gandhi and Nehru, used the freedom struggle itself as a revolution in thought against caste and communalism. Ceylon, handed independence on a tray, had only Buddhist and Hindu revivals that fought Christian dominance but, trapped by caste and unlike Ram Mohan Roy’s, never turned their criticism inward.
ඉතිහාසය නැවත සලකා බැලීමක්
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s institutions are collapsing without anything new taking their place: the UNP and SLFP are historically spent, having built and then gorged on a predatory executive presidency, and the country runs like a bolting horse. To read the present he turns to the past, rejecting the anti-imperial myth that colonialism ruined a prosperous island. The Colebrooke–Cameron reforms freed people from caste service and built a unified modern state; the failure to unite the nation and democratise society belongs to Sri Lanka’s own leaders.
ලේ තැවරුණු නිදහසේ හැටපස් වසර
On the 65th anniversary of independence, Ivan argues that Sri Lanka never met the two conditions a nation-state needed: a united nation and a democratic political society. Contrasting India’s mass freedom struggle and three-year constituent assembly with Ceylon’s bloodless, deferential transfer of power, he recalls caste and religion used against A.E. Goonesinha, E.W. Perera and Arunachalam, and Oliver Goonetilleke’s manipulation of the Soulbury Commission. Each constitution since, culminating in the executive presidency, has deepened the distortion.
දරුවන් දීග දීම
Continuing his series on family life, Ivan turns to marriage. He recalls the baker in the house where he boarded as a boy in Katugastota, whose ‘theory’ was that what cannot be seen does no harm, and the romance of the baker’s son that the family tried to break. He warns parents against both indulging and overruling their children’s choices, against searching obsessively into a partner’s lineage, and against letting horoscopes ruin girls’ lives, and urges that daughters be encouraged to continue their education.
පෙරටුගාමී පක්ෂයේ ස්වයං විවේචනය
Amid the decay of every party, Ivan reviews the newly formed Frontline Socialist Party through its 445-page book on the JVP’s path from 1978 to 2012, billed as a self-criticism but really a critique of its parent party. Its young members are committed, he says, but their thinking still lives before the fall of the Berlin Wall, ending with Lenin on the dictatorship of the proletariat. The book romanticises JVP culture without asking why idealistic youth became executioners in 1988–89. He traces a thread through the JVP’s history: after Wijeweera’s disappointing 273,248 votes in 1982, the party never found a leader the public would accept, backing Rajapaksa in 2005 and Fonseka in 2010 for want of its own candidate — a dilemma rooted in race, caste and religion. The FSP must put knowledge before action.
පූර්ණ ප්රතිසංවිධානයක අවශ්යතාව
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s schools of thought still see the ethnic question as they did while Prabhakaran lived, arguing only over how much of the 13th Amendment to grant. The root problem, he says, is the failure after 1948 to build a united nation and a democratic society to sustain the state and democracy inherited from Britain: Burghers were driven out, Indian Tamil plantation workers lost their citizenship, Tamils lost language rights, and the 1972 and 1978 constitutions completed the decay of governance. With terrorism defeated, the rot is visible and the moment has come to rebuild nation and state together. He sets out an eighteen-point agenda — from abolishing caste discrimination and fixing national policies to curbing corruption, criminalised politics and inequality — for a four-to-five-year national programme involving all parties.