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.
ජනාධිපති මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂගේ අනාගතය
Winning the election will not save a president who cannot look back honestly at his own record, Ivan argues. He sets the strengths against the limits — the war won, the family’s grip, the corruption and nepotism, the scale of the cabinet — and says the victory was an opening to build a political system worth the name, an opening the president has so far declined.
යුද වීරයන් දෙදෙනකු අතර කෙරෙන්නට නියමිත ශුද්ධ වූ සංග්රාමය
The victory over the LTTE made Mahinda Rajapaksa a giant and every other politician a dwarf, so the opposition answered a hero with a hero. Ivan weighs General Fonseka’s candidacy — the silence about what he stands for, the JVP’s and the UNP’s incompatible expectations of him, and the record of soldiers who entered politics and did not stay democrats.
බල තරගයේ හැඩතල
The picture has changed from one in which the government would win any election easily to one in which it must fight for them. Ivan traces the crisis to the scale of the president’s own coming victory, and argues that the country turned a policy of taking help from the anti-American world into publicly campaigning for it — going so far as to attack Obama, which even China, Iran and Venezuela did not do.
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.
අද්විතීය බවේ උභතෝකෝටිකය
The government expects a large win in the south, where its base is, but the south is also the most critical province in the country and the uncritical loyalty of six months ago has gone. Ivan sets the president’s standing beside Sarath Fonseka’s — a man made equally singular by the same victory, for whom no office in the country was large enough — and notes how much local politicians’ cut-outs are costing the government in public patience.
විධායක ජනාධිපති ක්රමය අවශ්ය නම් එය ප්රතිසංවිධානය කළ යුතුය
A change to the system can only be had if government and opposition both want it for its own sake rather than as a way of unseating each other. Ivan sets the American presidency against the Sri Lankan one point by point — an electoral college rather than a direct vote, no power to dissolve the legislature or to call an early election, an impeachment that can actually remove — and argues that ours was written so that none of those checks bite.
මහින්ද රාජපක්ෂගේ හතර අවුරුද්ද
The president may call an election as soon as four years of his term are done — a power added to the constitution by amendment for the benefit of the incumbent and now enjoyed by all of them. Ivan takes stock of the four years: the LTTE gone with not even a ghost of Prabhakaran left, the whole territory in the state’s hands, and the question of whether the respect of opponents as well as supporters can be won.
පරාජයට බිය නොවන රනිල්
Ivan reads the revolt against Ranil Wickremesinghe at Sirikotha as an illustration of the
political system’s absurdity: a party with no constitutional means of removing its own
leader, in which the leader holds the same absolute power over the party that the president
holds over the country. He imagines Ranil’s arithmetic — his uncle reached the top at
seventy-one — and concludes that until the party gives itself a civilised constitution,
nothing it does about the man will matter.
ප්රතිවාදී නායකයන් අඟුටුමිට්ටන් බවට පත්වී ජනාධිපති යෝධයකු බවට පත්වීම
An analysis of the Sri Lankan political landscape following the 2009 provincial council elections. The article discusses how Mahinda Rajapaksa solidified his power, rendering opposition leaders like Ranil Wickremesinghe politically impotent and crippling the UNP and JVP. The author urges the President not to misuse this massive mandate like J.R. Jayewardene did, but instead use it to dismantle the corrupt political system, establish private universities, eradicate ethnic divisions, and build a truly democratic nation.