චෞර රැජිනගේ රසකථා
Reading Upul Joseph Fernando’s interview with Chandrika Kumaratunga in Lankadeepa, Ivan takes apart the picture of a poor and blameless former president whose children travel by bus. She names two mistakes she knew were mistakes when she made them, and Ivan supplies the reason she does not: the appetite for power inside a system she and Ranil Wickremesinghe built between them.
කළ හැක්කේ කුමක්ද?
Addressed to a coalition of civil organisations: agree on the aim before anything else, and make it a large one. Ivan proposes a Sri Lanka whose political system treats every citizen as an equal regardless of race, religion, language, caste or sex, works out which three demands to begin with, and sets out a campaign — posters, workshops, interviews, lunch-hour pickets, sermons — to carry them.
අචේ විසඳුම ම ශ්රී ලංකාවට ද ගැලපේ
Prabhakaran can stop the war as surely as the president can, Ivan writes, and the main obstacle to a negotiated settlement is the Thimpu principles, framed to make negotiation impossible and since treated as its precondition. He sets out the Aceh settlement and what its equivalent would look like here: disarmament, the withdrawal of the additional forces, the high security zones gone, people back on their land and an interim administration until a provincial election.
The Harvest of 60 Years of Independence
At sixty years of independence, Ivan refuses to blame the colonial rulers. Sri Lanka began with roads, railways, literacy and income ahead of most of Asia, and fell behind because its leaders ran the British system on feudal lines. He calls for a political system accountable to the people and a national dialogue on where the country went wrong.
රටේ දේශපාලන නායකත්වය පිළිබඳ ගැටලුව
A Sunday Times survey of 519 people for the sixtieth anniversary asked which post-independence leader had most capacity to take the country forward. No leader had won the confidence of a majority; D.S. Senanayake came first and even he scored low; Chandrika Kumaratunga drew one per cent. Ivan reads the result as a verdict on what the office does to whoever holds it.
13 වැනි සංශෝධනය ක්රියාත්මක කිරීම
The government has decided to give provincial councils the full powers the 13th Amendment already allows. Ivan calls it arguable but better than doing nothing, and adds what costs nothing and is not being done either: making it possible to deal with state offices in Tamil in the north and east and in the Western and Central provinces, recruiting the staff for it, and rewarding bilingualism.
රට තීරණාත්මක තැනක
Ivan puts the decisions facing the country as a numbered list: whether to keep the All Party Representative Committee going and produce a settlement, whether to protect the European trade concession the garment industry depends on, and what the UNP is for if it will not take a far-sighted position on either.
මහින්ද රනිල් පොරය
In this political system the ruler and the leader of the opposition can survive only by destabilising each other, Ivan writes, and the system has decayed far enough that each attempt weakens both. He reads Ranil Wickremesinghe waiting to be chosen as the next saviour and Mahinda Rajapaksa waiting on the war, and says both are prisoners of the same corrupt arrangement.
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.