Anarchy is more dangerous than dictatorship
Victor Ivan recalls telling an audience the country would go bankrupt, and Mangala Samaraweera rising to accept it. The column argues that anarchy is a worse danger than dictatorship.
Youth struggle; what could be the end?
Ranil Wickremesinghe is appointed Prime Minister and Victor Ivan calls it a good omen. He also tells the youth movement plainly that its slogan cost it the reforms it could have won.
Revisit the strategies
A working document rather than an essay: Victor Ivan’s numbered proposal for an interim administration and an interim constitution, written for a forum of people’s representatives.
Anarchy must be averted
Blackouts, queues and no plan. Victor Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is constitutionally primitive, and that an interim constitution is the only way to keep the collapse from becoming anarchy.
The struggle of the youth, what will be the end?
The New Year dawned with the Central Bank declaring bankruptcy. Victor Ivan puts the hard question to the protesters: if GotaGoHome succeeds, what exactly will have changed?
The mass uprising: What could be the outcome?
Written a week after Mirihana. Victor Ivan reads the protest movement as a direct democratic uprising and asks what it can actually win, beyond removing one man.
Overcoming the crisis
A programme in two phases: go to the IMF, bring the Government into a reform process, pass an interim constitution, and complete the new one by referendum. Written as the queues were forming.
Another aspect of the crisis
Corruption, not just monetary mismanagement, is what emptied the reserves. Victor Ivan follows the vehicle permits back to J.R. Jayewardene and the predatory system he built around them.
Prime cause of the crisis
On the 74th independence anniversary Victor Ivan finds the public discussion unusually advanced, then argues that Parliament itself is illegally constituted and points to the Jayewardene Centre as the founding example.
The elephant, goat and the rope
Rohan Samarajiva answers back, so Victor Ivan sets out the case against independent commissions in detail, drawing on India and Hong Kong to show what an appointing body has to be before it can work.