Black Easter
The first column after the Easter Sunday bombings. Victor Ivan sets the attacks against a longer record of political murder and asks what kind of state failed to see them coming.
Wounding the social psyche
A lawsuit filed in Los Angeles by Lasantha Wickrematunge’s daughter opens Victor Ivan’s account of the wounds left on Sri Lankan society by abductions, disappearances and unpunished political murder.
Can Sri Lanka be saved?
Neither the government nor the opposition, Victor Ivan argues, but a third option: he describes what the Punarudaya Movement has actually tried in villages and meeting halls, and what it learned.
Playing with history
Answering a published reply to his own column, Victor Ivan sets out what the record actually shows about the decline of the Raja Rata, the British period and the uses to which Sri Lankan history is put.
Alcoholic beverages and ganja
Victor Ivan begins with arrack and ends with ganja, tracing how liquor built schools and fortunes in colonial Ceylon and how prohibition-minded policy since has served neither health nor honesty.
What went wrong with Sri Lanka? (Part II)
Sri Lanka’s independence movement, Victor Ivan argues, was never a movement for liberation — and the elite that inherited the state kept caste and ethnicity as instruments of politics rather than dismantling them.
What went wrong with Sri Lanka?
Seventy-one years after independence, countries that were behind Sri Lanka have overtaken it. Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the colonial inheritance, the uses made of ancient history, and the poverty of the country’s intellectual life.
Understanding Sri Lanka through education and agriculture
Rote learning from Grade 1 to Advanced Level; paddy land worked at a loss; wild animals destroying two-fifths of the crop. Victor Ivan uses education and agriculture to show how far the country’s thinking has fallen behind.
Understanding the root cause of the crisis
The collapse Victor Ivan sees around him did not begin in October 2018. He traces it to the failure, from independence onward, to build a single nation out of Sri Lanka’s ethnic, caste and religious divisions.
සෝභිත හිමිගේ ප්රවේශය
Ivan assesses the campaign led by the Venerable Maduluwawe Sobitha to abolish the executive presidency through a common candidate. He cites two indicators of institutional collapse, a former Chief Justice’s estimate and the substandard-cement case, and sets out six reservations: it seeks limited amendment rather than a full new constitution, ties everything to one election, and depends on a candidate. He then lists steps the opposition, especially the UNP, must take to correct course.