Disabled electoral system and Gotabaya’s candidacy
With Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s candidacy contested in court over his citizenship, Victor Ivan turns to the machinery of the election itself — an Election Commission without the power to enforce its own rules.
Ours is a failed state
Victor Ivan measures the failure of the state by what has happened to rural life — the collapse of peasant agriculture, the plunder of land, and a school system that sorts children by their parents’ means.
The Parliament stands naked
A Parliament that cannot legislate, cannot control public finance and will not monitor the executive. Victor Ivan traces the decline from the land reform of the 1970s to members trading with the government they are meant to audit.
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.
Referring the matter to the Supreme Court
The full text of the public appeal to the Supreme Court on MPs who transact business with the state, signed by Victor Ivan and some sixty writers, academics, journalists, lawyers and trade unionists.
Fox and the poultry pen
The state owns the land, the sea, the rivers and the air — and its custodians have been helping themselves. Victor Ivan traces the licences, the leases and the presidential foundations, and asks the Supreme Court to act.
Laundering the Parliament
Victor Ivan publishes his correspondence with the Speaker of Parliament on MPs who do business with the state — the request, the reply, and his answer to it.
Plunder of public property by rulers
Victor Ivan sets out how the plunder of public property was built into the state: laws left unenforced after 1977, permits handed to relatives and cronies, and MPs unseated by the courts then reappointed by their leaders.
Overcoming wretchedness
What the country needs now is not an election but structural change, Victor Ivan argues — and he describes trying, and failing, to get that point onto the agenda of a meeting of party leaders.
Black Easter
The first column after the Easter Sunday bombings. Victor Ivan sets the attacks against a longer record of political murder and asks what kind of state failed to see them coming.