Paradise in Tears
Written from a sick bed after Shehan Karunatilaka praised ‘Paradise in Tears’. Victor Ivan recalls Mangala Samaraweera’s intervention, the Indian investigator who bought three copies, and the ten-year struggle against Sarath Silva.
Putting the country on right track
Victor Ivan answers the anger his defence of Ranil Wickremesinghe provoked, describes how the man’s public image was manufactured against him, and states plainly what his own role in all this has been.
Ranil’s destiny
Victor Ivan describes taking his reform plan to Gotabaya Rajapaksa during the uprising, then makes the case for Ranil Wickremesinghe — a man, he argues, whose character the media deliberately destroyed.
Is Lanka insane?
A nation, Victor Ivan writes, can go mad the way a person can. The column diagnoses the intellectual paucity behind the debt crisis and sets out what an IMF programme would have to be built on.
Recreating the State
Answering the response to ‘End of an era’, Victor Ivan sets out the changes themselves — an itemised programme for rebuilding the state, from investigating the presidents to regulating the broadcasters.
The role of journalism
Asked why he proposed closing Ravaya, Victor Ivan answers with an account of what the paper was for — the battle against Sarath Nanda Silva, the criminal defamation law, and the case he took to the United Nations.
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.
Acquiring the desired change
Readers keep asking Victor Ivan how change is actually to be won. His answer: turn the presidential election into a referendum on the system itself, and civilise a media culture that lives off public frequencies.
සරත් සිල්වා ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Ceylon Today did not print his reply uncut as promised, Ivan says, and the media that now present Sarath N. Silva as a saviour include owners who won judgments from him when he needed their support. Silva, once slated as the common opposition candidate, still poses as a reformer. Ivan contrasts Justice Mark Fernando’s rulings, which forced the only free and fair election since 1977, with Silva’s court, which turned away election petitioners. Four of six UN Human Rights Committee findings against Sri Lanka concern Silva’s judgments, among them S.B. Dissanayake’s and Tony Fernando’s, jailed for contempt after petitioning a bench Silva himself led.
ජනමාධ්ය හැසිරීම ගැන
A friend who has read Ivan’s book on the Lenin Ratnayake affair many times asked him why no newspaper reported the day a remand prisoner struck Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake with a bag of excrement in the Nikaweratiya court, after the magistrate had abused the prisoner’s wife. Local reporters, Ivan concludes, stayed silent to please the magistrate. He then recounts how a former court officer turned television court reporter brokered favourable judgments for his channel’s owner in exchange for coverage that propped up Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva. Sri Lanka’s media culture, he argues, is as corrupt as its political culture.