ලසන්ත වික්රමතුංග
Ten days after the murder, Ivan writes about a friend he had fallen out with. Lasantha was the finest investigative journalist Sri Lanka has produced — the instinct, the persistence, the ability to read what documents concealed — but the politician inside him was a small man, wielding the pen to install a UNP government in which he expected a senior ministry. He exposed his opponents’ corruption without mercy and covered up his own side’s. Ivan recounts the 1999 Town Hall bomb, when both were to be arrested and they packed bags for Singapore until Ranil Wickremesinghe called Lasantha back; Chandrika Kumaratunga’s later claim that she stopped a minister’s plan to kill them; and the quarrel over her interview and Ivan’s book that soured the friendship. Assassination, he writes, gave the life its meaning.
The Third Reading of the Budget: What might happen?
After the government survived the second reading of the 2008 budget, Ivan weighs the UNP’s chances of defeating it at the third. He argues that even a defeat would not force a dissolution, that MPs want to finish their terms, and that party leaders should stop fighting over a rotten system and agree to change it.
Defeating Mr. President All But Impossible
Despite corruption, rights abuses, nepotism and rising prices, Ivan argues that President Rajapaksa is almost impossible to unseat before the presidential election of 2011. The UNP can defeat the budget only with the JVP, which gains too much from the government to risk it, and the rules of the system favour the President over the opposition.
Mangala’s Unfinished Revolution
Mangala Samaraweera’s revolt against President Rajapaksa has hurt the regime, but Ivan finds it neither consistent nor honest. He compares it with the 1991 impeachment move by Athulathmudali and Dissanayake, and reminds readers of the share Samaraweera took under Kumaratunga and of the waste in the institutions he controlled.
The Future is Uncertain
Victor Ivan finds the President immobilised. He cannot abandon the JVP after the support it gave him at the presidential election, yet dropping it would mean placing full faith in Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom he does not trust; and a president dependent on the JVP is trapped in its framework, as Chandrika Kumaratunga discovered. Neither party can transform the other, so nothing moves without the JVP’s consent. Ivan sees the same deadlock between the government and the LTTE, each blocked by India — which will permit neither the oppression of Tamils in the north and east nor a separate state. He puts the negotiating gap in a simile: the LTTE asked for tens of thousands of buns, was offered thousands, refused, and is now invited to the table for one. A government proposing decentralisation within a unitary framework is offering less than the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact of 1958, and cannot raise the offer while the JVP and Hela Urumaya hold it in place. With no negotiated route left, Ivan warns the LTTE may settle accounts by war and may seek borders drawn by community — an attack on the Sinhalese of the East making it impossible for Tamils to live in the south, and opening the way to massacre and mutual slaughter.
The President and the JVP
Victor Ivan argues that unless Mahinda Rajapaksa resumes talks in defiance of the memoranda he signed with the JVP and the Jathika Hela Urumaya, war will return. He has already tested the limits: Norway remains facilitator despite an undertaking to remove it, talks look likely outside Asia against a condition that they be held within it, and Anton Balasingham has been summoned without objection. But Ivan doubts the JVP will let him go much further, and explains why its leaders cannot retreat even if some now privately doubt their own conditions — admitting error would expose them to their own members as politically shallow, so they must keep defending a position that no longer fits. The President’s first problem, he writes, is choosing between the JVP and the country. He then draws the parallel with Chandrika Kumaratunga, freed from the UNP’s encirclement by the JVP only to find herself in its prison instead, and notes that Rajapaksa faces the same choice in far better conditions: the UNP fragmented, its alliances weakened, and the LTTE no longer friendly to it.
What Can Happen?
Victor Ivan returns to Johan Galtung’s warning that Sri Lanka might end up temporarily under United Nations administration if it fails to manage its crises. Having read Ivan’s An Unfinished Struggle, Galtung reasoned that a judiciary decayed to that degree implied equal decay elsewhere, and that only a failing state deteriorates so far. Ivan’s test is whether serious mistakes get corrected, and he finds no mechanism that does. An election was held without an elections commission because the President twice refused to approve a list the constitutional council had vetted and cleared; parliament and the judiciary both declined to intervene; and with the council’s own term expired, the police and public service commissions cannot be constituted either, making every transfer, promotion and disciplinary action in those services unconstitutional. A year after the tsunami, 6% of the required houses are built — seventeen years at that rate — and the country cannot yet say how many of its dead were men and how many women. He then reads the party system as collapsing: Thondaman reduced to seeking LTTE shelter, the UNP too decayed to reform itself, the SLFP surviving only on state power. Only the JVP and the LTTE retain vigour, and both, he argues, have spent their history accelerating the state’s decay.
Trends in the Presidential Contest
Three weeks from the 2005 presidential election, Victor Ivan sets out what each outcome would produce. Defeat ends the political life of whichever man suffers it, and fragments his party. A Wickremesinghe victory brings immediate dissolution and a parliamentary election that would cut the JVP and Hela Urumaya down, after which Ivan expects him to seek an SLFP coalition anyway to shield his peace programme from objection. A Rajapaksa victory requires no dissolution, since the Hela Urumaya could simply be added to the Alliance — though Ivan finds him harder to read, uncertain whether he would accommodate the JVP and Hela Urumaya or pursue an agenda of his own. He then turns to the arithmetic: the Alliance’s 45.60% in 2004 falls some 500,000 votes short of a presidential majority, and its 2004 total merely preserved what the SLFP and JVP had polled separately in 2001 rather than adding to it. The UNP’s losses since 2001 match the Jathika Hela Urumaya’s gains almost exactly, making those voters decisive. And the Tamil National Alliance vote, which nearly doubled in 2004, rests with the LTTE — which may back neither candidate, in which case turnout in the north and east will fall.
Sinhala Buddhist Vote Base and the Presidential Election
Six weeks before the 2005 presidential election, Victor Ivan works through whether it can be won on Sinhala Buddhist votes alone. He begins by conceding the JVP’s pre-2004 argument was arithmetically sound: had the SLFP, JVP and EPDP contested together in 2001 they would have outpolled the UNP-led alliance by 27,579 votes. Contesting as one in 2004 they gained only 5,019 votes on their separate 2001 total, took 108 seats without a majority, and were outpolled by the combined opposition by some seven lakhs — 46.04% against 53.96%. But a presidential election is a different instrument: two contenders, one national constituency, and a winner who must clear half the vote. Ivan estimates the Sinhala Buddhist electorate at 6,094,667 of roughly 9.16 million valid votes, meaning a candidate relying on it alone would need 75% of it — a target he does not think easily attainable. He notes too why minorities prefer the presidential system: with the Sinhala vote split between the main parties, their votes can decide who becomes head of state.
The Mahinda – Anura Equation
The President has named Mahinda Rajapaksa her party’s presidential candidate and her own brother its prime ministerial candidate, though only the first nomination was asked for — and done while an amendment making her SLFP leader for life was being introduced. Victor Ivan reads it as a chess move of some cunning: in every sequence of elections, a defeated Mahinda loses even the seat he holds while Anura Bandaranaike emerges as leader of the opposition, and family control of the party survives the defeat. Behind it sits the unresolved question of whether the presidential election falls in 2005 or 2006, and a chain of unanswerable questions about what the Elections Commissioner will decide, whether the President will seek a Supreme Court interpretation first, and what either will do if they disagree. Ivan then turns to the parties themselves, arguing neither main party is democratic — the SLFP run by one family, the UNP by several — and traces the pattern of leaders seeking to escape their term limits: Jayewardene collecting undated resignation letters from a five-sixths majority and dreaming of a third term until Premadasa stood against him, Kumaratunga collecting the same letters from twenty-three deputy ministers in 2000 with the judiciary’s support. Her dreams end, he concludes, only if Mahinda can become a Premadasa.