Overcoming ideological anarchy
Mao on falling into pits. Victor Ivan argues that neither the protesters nor the opposition parties who borrowed their slogan have worked out whether it can actually be done.
Choosing destruction instead of salvation
COPE’s daily hearings show where the money went. Victor Ivan notes that everyone is shouting at someone to go home and nobody is asking anyone to take charge.
A way out of the crisis?
An all-party consensus, and quickly. Victor Ivan offers his reform proposals as a specimen of the scale required rather than a text to be adopted, and warns of the stage below the present one.
Anarchy is more dangerous than dictatorship
Victor Ivan recalls telling an audience the country would go bankrupt, and Mangala Samaraweera rising to accept it. The column argues that anarchy is a worse danger than dictatorship.
Youth struggle; what could be the end?
Ranil Wickremesinghe is appointed Prime Minister and Victor Ivan calls it a good omen. He also tells the youth movement plainly that its slogan cost it the reforms it could have won.
Revisit the strategies
A working document rather than an essay: Victor Ivan’s numbered proposal for an interim administration and an interim constitution, written for a forum of people’s representatives.
The struggle of the youth, what will be the end?
The New Year dawned with the Central Bank declaring bankruptcy. Victor Ivan puts the hard question to the protesters: if GotaGoHome succeeds, what exactly will have changed?
The mass uprising: What could be the outcome?
Written a week after Mirihana. Victor Ivan reads the protest movement as a direct democratic uprising and asks what it can actually win, beyond removing one man.
Crisis of Sri Lanka: Champika and Anura
Champika Ranawaka and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, judged side by side. Victor Ivan credits both where their proposals are sound and faults both for saying nothing about the judiciary or Parliament.
The crisis and Anura Kumara
Anura Kumara Dissanayake says the JVP is ready to lead. Victor Ivan, who knows the party’s history from the inside, weighs that claim against what its violence did to the country.