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.
Lawful public uprising!
The first of three parts. Victor Ivan builds a case for a lawful uprising out of republicanism, the sovereignty of the people, and a 1991 UN Human Rights Committee judgment from Canada.
Playing with the crisis
Victor Ivan notes that he predicted bankruptcy three years earlier as a political analyst rather than an economist, then sets out what the import restrictions and the fertiliser ban will do next.
Changing the nation’s fate
Not a manifesto but a method: Victor Ivan sets out how a mass of citizens could file fundamental rights petitions together, and what a Centre of Public Movement built on that would be able to do.
Sri Lanka: Another cause for failure
Dharmapala and Marx, the Soulbury Constitution broken before the ink was dry, and the citizenship of the plantation workers. Victor Ivan traces the decline to the choices made at the moment of independence.
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.
What if everyone fails?
With every institution of the state failed, Victor Ivan asks who is left. He measures Champika Ranawaka against the standard and finds an educated man who is still, in his judgment, a tribal leader.
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.
The dilemma of the victory
A two-thirds majority and no idea what to do with it. Victor Ivan reads the 2020 landslide as a dilemma for the winners — and reserves his sharpest analysis for what became of the UNP and the JVP.
Foundations of incivility
Why does a country tolerate constitutional violation after constitutional violation without protest? Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the intellectual poverty of the Left, the language question and the habit of judicial silence.