End of an era?
The pandemic is an accident, not a conspiracy. Victor Ivan argues it has merely accelerated a collapse already under way, and asks whether what is ending is a government or an era.
Added to the pandemic, a constitutional crisis
Parliament dissolved, an election impossible, and the president’s spending power expiring on 30 April. Victor Ivan sets out the constitutional deadlock the pandemic created, alongside the communal poison it released.
Parliamentary Election and anarchy
Behind the carnival of a parliamentary election, Victor Ivan sees anarchy: soldiers doing police work, a constitution honoured informally, and a central bank robbed with no one held to account.
මැතිවරණයෙන් ඉදිරියට
The results of the elections for 65 local bodies show that no decline or collapse has yet happened in public confidence in the Rajapaksa coalition government. With the faults and weaknesses of its administration plainly visible, the public have still chosen, among the alternatives open to them, the one that approves it.
ජයග්රහණයේ වටිනාකම බොඳ කරගැනීම
Fonseka’s arrest, whatever the grounds, dulls the shine of Rajapaksa’s victory and can be read as a move to head off an election petition. Ivan sets out the opposition’s crisis at that moment: Fonseka wanted to keep the swan symbol and the leadership that came with it, believing he had lifted the UNP’s base from two million votes to 4.1 million, while Wickremesinghe insisted on the elephant. Privately, Ivan writes, Wickremesinghe was relieved by the scale of the defeat — a narrow loss would have made Fonseka unchallengeable — and on the day of the arrest sent word through Mangala Samaraweera offering nomination under the elephant. The JVP is in the deeper crisis, having first approached Sarath Nanda Silva before settling on Fonseka, and may now win no seats at all. Ivan judges them the most remarkable political movement in the country, undone by an inability to revise an old doctrine for a changed world.
සාමකාමී හා ශිෂ්ටසම්පන්නවීමේ වැදගත්කම
Elections are the highest exercise of popular sovereignty and a measure of a country’s political civility — and on that measure Sri Lanka’s record since 1977 offers only cause for shame. Every administration has used state resources and state media for its campaign; only once has election law been followed to the letter, and only because the Supreme Court intervened. People die at every election, the educated speak of it with distress, and everyone forgets once polling closes. Sri Lanka may be the only country with no law controlling party and campaign funds, yet a leading presidential candidate can spend over 1,500 million rupees, and even a parliamentary candidate 100 million. That money is other people’s and must be repaid in some form: this is the foundation of corruption. Whoever wins, both candidates must pledge there will be no reprisals.
සේනාපති හා සේනාධිනායකයා අතර තරගය
The UNP and the JVP brought the General forward partly to force a parliamentary election first, Ivan argues, and the president wrong-footed them by calling the presidential one early. He compares the two men as political animals — one seasoned and cured, the other still an apprentice — and says that is the factor that will decide it, for and against the General alike.
ඉදිරියේ විය හැක්කේ කුමක්ද?
State power is gathered around the executive presidency, so the presidential election matters more than any other, and the system is built so that whoever holds the office can arrange every other election to suit. Ivan works through the court judgment, the Sarath Fonseka factor, where the Tamil vote will go, and the steady evaporation of the war’s pleasure.
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.
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.