Political Funds- The Root of corruption
Ivan argues that the absence of any law on party and election funding is the main source of corruption in Sri Lanka. He compares the spending limits and disclosure rules of the United States, France and India with Sri Lanka’s single, unenforced assets law, and describes how candidates repay their backers from public resources.
ප්රතිවාදී නායකයන් අඟුටුමිට්ටන් බවට පත්වී ජනාධිපති යෝධයකු බවට පත්වීම
An analysis of the Sri Lankan political landscape following the 2009 provincial council elections. The article discusses how Mahinda Rajapaksa solidified his power, rendering opposition leaders like Ranil Wickremesinghe politically impotent and crippling the UNP and JVP. The author urges the President not to misuse this massive mandate like J.R. Jayewardene did, but instead use it to dismantle the corrupt political system, establish private universities, eradicate ethnic divisions, and build a truly democratic nation.
අනාගතය ගැන අලුතෙන් හිතමු
The war’s quick end is now in sight, and the largest remaining problem is how to free the civilians trapped on a small strip of land. The government has declared a no-fire zone, but the LTTE, using those people as a shield, is unlikely to let them cross into it. Once that is resolved the LTTE can only take to the jungle — and the jungle left to it, however thick, is not as large as Thoppigala. Ivan doubts a movement developed to that level can easily revert to guerrilla warfare. The end of the LTTE would widen both the country’s development space and its democratic space: resettlement, rebuilding, provincial and local elections in the north. The most contested question will be what answer is given to Tamil grievances, and it can only be answered if government and opposition work together. The country needs a large change, not a small one.
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.
දේශපාලන අරමුදල් හෙවත් දූෂණයේ මුදුන් මුල
Ivan puts the cost of a Sri Lankan presidential campaign at between 500 million and a
billion rupees and shows that no law governs where any of it comes from, J.R. Jayewardene
having repealed the pre-1978 controls. Setting the American, French and Indian regimes
against the Sri Lankan vacuum, he argues that parties financed by a few men with black money
must repay them from public resources, and calls this the taproot of the country’s
corruption.
2009 වසර හා දේශපාලන අංක ගණිතය
Ivan opens 2009 expecting the global collapse to hit Sri Lanka hard. The year begins with the Golden Key crisis dragging the rest of Ceylinco’s finance companies down, tea, cinnamon and rubber in unprecedented difficulty, and smallholders who once earned well unable to live. War spending for 2009 is 177 billion rupees, and the country must fight through an economic crisis it cannot abandon the war to escape. At Kilinochchi the army advances slowly through bunds, trenches and traps, its target the LTTE’s war machine rather than territory. Meanwhile a run of court rulings against the government, above all on fuel prices, had trapped it politically — until it escaped by cutting fuel, gas and official expenses in one package worth 16 billion rupees, and put the opposition on the defensive instead. Ranil is the better mathematician; Mahinda is the better political arithmetician.
නැගෙනහිර ඡන්දය
The Eastern provincial council election is a turning point in the ethnic conflict, held in the territory the LTTE claimed while the war against it goes on. Ivan works through the demography district by district — no community holds a majority in the province — and the 2004 parliamentary results party by party, and shows why the chief ministership is the point of the dispute.
ජවිපෙ අර්බුදය කොයිබට ද?
The attempt to strip Weerawansa of his position has turned him round to attack the party, and ten of its members of parliament have publicly backed him. Ivan reads it as a split that cannot be contained, predicts where the pieces will go at the next election, and traces the decline to a movement that never acquired the political knowledge its constituency needed.
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.
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.