Ranjan’s whirlpool and National Anthem
Thirteen thousand recorded phone calls seized from an MP’s house, and a government that wants the national anthem sung only in Sinhala. Victor Ivan reads both as tests of how civil the nation is.
The vicious cycle of revenge
Each government jails the last one’s ministers and is jailed in turn. Victor Ivan calls it a tribal inheritance — a cycle of revenge that has replaced accountability and now protects everyone from investigation.
Reflections on Presidential Elections
Victor Ivan looks back at 2010 and 2015 and then at the man on the 2019 ballot, setting out at length what was done to journalists and soldiers during Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s years as Defence Secretary.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Wounding the social psyche
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles by Lasantha Wickrematunge’s daughter opens Victor Ivan’s account of the wounds left on Sri Lankan society by abductions, disappearances and unpunished political murder.
Roots of bribery and corruption
Corruption in Sri Lanka is not a failure of individual character but a system built deliberately, Victor Ivan argues — traced here from J.R. Jayewardene’s admiration for Napoleon to the party machinery that now depends on it.