සමනළ වැව හා හම්බන්තොට වරාය
When giant development schemes are made by decisions taken on the political power of politicians alone, disregarding expert advice, the destruction a country can suffer is enormous. Some geologists, irrigation engineers and civil engineers had heavy criticisms of the accelerated Mahaweli scheme, and it was begun in disregard of them.
පාර්ලිමේන්තුවේ බලය සීමා කර ගැනීම
When the JVP member Anura Kumara Dissanayake tried to make a statement in parliament about the hedging agreement, the government whip’s objection turned it into a point of order for the Speaker to rule on. Ivan answers it with a precedent: the debate in the State Council, at the end of 1938 or the beginning of 1939, over a worker named Govinda shot dead by police during a strike at Mul Oya estate in Hewaheta.
විදේශ ආයෝජකයන්ට ඉඩම් විකිණීම හා සංචාරක කර්මාන්තය
The Sunday Times has reported that the government intends to sell the 500-acre island being built in the sea off Galle Face to a Chinese investor for 700 million dollars, and that it means to remove the 100 per cent tax now charged when land is sold to foreign investors and to replace the 99-year lease with outright sale.
අවිධිමත්භාවයට මහජනයා වන්දි ගෙවීම
Among the bad features native to this political system, one of the most important is that there is no orderly way of weighing the good and the bad of a state transaction — sometimes worth hundreds of millions — before final approval is given to it. The article works through the hedging agreements, the purchase of electricity from the private sector, and how risk and return are shared between the private and the state sectors.
වේගවත් ඉදිරිගමනක් සඳහා දූෂණයට වැට බැඳිය යුතුය
Sri Lanka can only move quickly after the war if it reforms the political and institutional obstacles in its way, and cutting the cabinet to thirty-five is a start. Ivan attacks a convention he traces to J.R. Jayewardene: letting ministers and office-holders enrich themselves from the transactions of the ministries beneath them, which drains the treasury and turns politics from a matter of honour into a squalid way of making money. He questions the privileges — two vehicle permits for a six-year term when one car easily lasts six years, permits for officials who already have official cars, ministers running fleets, backup vehicles for bodyguards now the war is over. Corruption is not confined to politics: Customs collects perhaps a quarter of what it should, and Inland Revenue, Motor Traffic and Excise are no different. Information technology could triple that revenue at modest cost.
දූෂණය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Answering replies from Shiral Lakthilaka in Ravaya and Wasantha Wijenayake in Lanka, Ivan denies ever certifying the Rajapaksa administration as clean. His argument was that J.R. Jayewardene’s political system was built to reward plunder, so every ruling party since 1977 has been corrupt by design — and the opposition attacks corruption only to reclaim the right to profit from it. He rejects the claim that corruption cannot be proved without rumour, citing Ravaya’s own documented exposures under previous governments. He then turns to the libel suit Gotabaya Rajapaksa brought against Lasantha Wickrematunge over the MiG procurement story, and states that Wickrematunge’s celebrated posthumous editorial was written after his death by another hand.
දූෂණය සනාථ කළයුත්තේ කටකථාවලින් නොව නිශ්චිත සාක්ෂිවලිනි
Corruption is the loudest subject of the campaign and the worst argued. Ivan says any administration’s corruption deserves scrutiny at an election, then insists the opposition move from rumour to specific proof — and gives his own examples, among them a broadcasting licence written into a regulator’s own name and sold on. Assets declarations filed with nominations, he notes, are documents anyone may examine.
දේශපාලන ක්‍රමය වෙනස් කිරීම!
Abolishing the executive presidency is not the simple act it is being sold as. Ivan traces the underlying philosophy of the system, the cost the country pays for its irregularity, and the size of the cabinet — quoting the United Front’s own 1994 manifesto promising no more than twenty ministers against the fifty-four it appointed — and concludes that the change is possible, but complex, and needs people who understand what they are changing.
ජෙනරාල්ගේ ආරක්ෂාව
Fonseka’s fundamental rights petition says he had six hundred guards, ten escort vehicles and two bulletproof cars as Chief of Defence Staff, and a fraction of that as a candidate. Ivan says he should have proper protection both as the commander who won the war and as the main challenger — and then turns the numbers round to ask what a cabinet of more than a hundred is costing the army in men.
විපක්ෂයේ නව සන්ධානය හා විධායක ජනාධිපති ක්‍රමය අහෝසි කිරීම
The new opposition alliance has published ten principles with the abolition of the executive presidency at the head of them. Ivan welcomes an opposition able to work together and argues that the accusations the two sides trade — lawlessness, corruption, waste, public property taken as spoils — are all products of the same system, so the question worth arguing is what should replace it.