Making expectations realistic
The Aragalaya had a sensitive heart and no mature brain. Victor Ivan sets out what it achieved, why it failed, and what compromise the country would now have to reach.
Lawful public uprising! (2)
Part two turns to why liberalism never took here. Victor Ivan sets the JVP and the LTTE side by side as movements that drove their own communities into racism.
Crisis and the nation’s survival
Some disasters are avoidable. Victor Ivan argues this one still is, and that going to the IMF — even on its conditions, even if that means selling SriLankan Airlines — is part of how.
The end of an era of extremism
From the Mahavamsa to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Victor Ivan follows one line of thought through Sri Lankan history and argues that the era it produced is now, at last, ending.
Reawakening of Tamil society
The Pothuvil to Polikandy march reads to Victor Ivan as a Tamil society waking up. He sets it beside the two Sinhala insurrections and the failure, since 1948, to build a nation any minority could belong to.
The revolution betrayed and the fate of Sri Lanka
Not the voters but their leaders were the fools of 2015. Victor Ivan calls the good-governance years a betrayed revolution and traces the counter-revolution it made inevitable.
Unanswered question
North and east voted one way, the Sinhala south the other. Victor Ivan takes the ethnic arithmetic of the 2019 result as the unanswered question of Sri Lankan politics: how to make one nation out of three electorates.
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.
Avoiding essential reforms
The surface fire is out; the fire under the ashes is not. Victor Ivan compares Sri Lanka’s failure to build a nation with Gandhi’s approach in India, and asks why the necessary reforms are still being avoided.
එල්ටීටීඊ තහනම ඉවත් කිරීම ජනාධිපතිවරණ දිනය හා පාප්තුමාගේ ගමන
After the cabinet spokesman hinted at the election date, Ivan examines the constitutional timetable and the clash with the Pope’s January visit, which the Catholic Church had asked to keep apart from politics, and the astrologer’s role. He then discusses a European court ruling of 16 October 2014 on the LTTE’s listing, arguing that bans cannot last forever, that the LTTE was defeated militarily but remains strong in the diaspora, and that only a political solution will end its appeal.