Election, the transformative opportunity
Every candidate has a manifesto and none has a vision. Victor Ivan reads the campaign against the religious revivals of the nineteenth century and the failure, ever since, to build one nation.
A questionnaire for presidential candidates
Nine questions Victor Ivan puts to every presidential candidate — on national security, the assets law, schools, garbage, the killing of journalists, and whether a new constitution will be written by MPs or by the people.
Puzzles of Sri Lanka
The citizenship case is dismissed and the celebrations begin. Victor Ivan sets the moment against the longer puzzle of a country that has never managed to build a nation out of its own people.
Ours is a failed state
Victor Ivan measures the failure of the state by what has happened to rural life — the collapse of peasant agriculture, the plunder of land, and a school system that sorts children by their parents’ means.
The State and the bulldozer
A state that knows only how to bulldoze: Victor Ivan runs the argument through garbage, schools, paddy land, caste and fake passports, and concludes that structural reform must come before any election.
The messed-up lives
Why are people who have everything still unhappy? Victor Ivan writes about death, parental care, superstition taught as education, and what Einstein and Freud had to say to each other about it.
Honesty and sincerity
Falsehood has become an operating principle, Victor Ivan writes — in what is sold as kithul treacle, in what tourists are offered, in what schools certify, and in what professionals are licensed to do without ever being re-examined.
Kitchen and the State
Victor Ivan argues that what Sri Lankans eat and how they cook it is a political question — bound up with rural poverty, wasted harvests, crop damage by wild animals, and prohibitions inherited from Anagarika Dharmapala.
Avoiding essential reforms
The surface fire is out; the fire under the ashes is not. Victor Ivan compares Sri Lanka’s failure to build a nation with Gandhi’s approach in India, and asks why the necessary reforms are still being avoided.
Sri Lanka: Out of the frying pan into the fire
Victor Ivan looks at what the Easter attacks have done to the Muslim community and to the state’s intelligence services, and asks whether a country that has swum in blood for three decades can escape the cycle.