සහල් අර්බුදය
Rice disappeared from the market as soon as a controlled price was set. Ivan explains why — no paddy left in the marketing board, buying entirely through private traders, and no reason for a miller to sell below what he paid — adds the floods and the export restrictions in the rice-growing countries, and argues the moment is an opening for agriculture rather than only a shortage.
ජීවන වියදම් ගින්නෙන් දැවෙන ජනතාව
Ivan lays out the year’s price rises item by item from the agriculture department’s own figures — red raw rice from 39.34 rupees a kilo to over 70, samba to over 80, a coconut from 19 to 45, dhal from 86.48 to 160 — and asks what relief the government intends. His answers are practical: put uncultivated land to use, encourage home gardens, control crop damage by monkeys, and find something for those living on wages alone.
ඇඟලුම් කර්මාන්තය ආරක්ෂා කරගැනීම ජාතික වගකීමකි
Germany’s warning that the GSP+ concession could be withdrawn if the country does not meet the conditions it signed up to should be taken seriously, Ivan writes, and not enjoyed by the opposition as damage to the government. Garments drive the economy and employ village women; protecting the concession is the country’s responsibility, and if we have done wrong the answer is to put it right without delay.
මහින්ද හා ප්රභාකරන්
The sky is filling with the war’s black cloud and killing as much as possible has become its positive quality. Ivan asks where it ends — whether Mahinda brings Prabhakaran to his knees or the reverse — and answers that the honourable name goes to whichever leader is willing to admit that an injustice was done to the Tamil people and to put it right.
රටේ දේශපාලන නායකත්වය පිළිබඳ ගැටලුව
A Sunday Times survey of 519 people for the sixtieth anniversary asked which post-independence leader had most capacity to take the country forward. No leader had won the confidence of a majority; D.S. Senanayake came first and even he scored low; Chandrika Kumaratunga drew one per cent. Ivan reads the result as a verdict on what the office does to whoever holds it.
60 වසරක නිදහසේ අස්වැන්න
Sixty years on we still blame the British for what we have made of the country, Ivan writes, and we are not ready to ask honestly whether we did it to ourselves. India was worth wealth to the Empire and Ceylon was worth its position; what we inherited was a political system we then steered in a feudal pattern, dividing citizens by race, religion and caste for the convenience of ruling them.
හොංකොංවලින් උගත හැකි පාඩම් (1)
Hong Kong before 1974 was as rotten as Sri Lanka — a bribe was a condition of getting anything done, including calling the fire brigade. Today its police force is among the cleanest in the world. In the first of two parts Ivan sets out how corruption is structured here instead: what political power is worth, why business invests in politicians rather than in business, and what the country pays for it.
මහින්ද රනිල් පොරය
In this political system the ruler and the leader of the opposition can survive only by destabilising each other, Ivan writes, and the system has decayed far enough that each attempt weakens both. He reads Ranil Wickremesinghe waiting to be chosen as the next saviour and Mahinda Rajapaksa waiting on the war, and says both are prisoners of the same corrupt arrangement.
2008 ආණ්ඩුවට තීරණාත්මකය
Opening the 2008 columns, Ivan reads the year ahead as the test of the Rajapaksa administration. The military advantage over the LTTE is its strongest asset and simultaneously its greatest liability — it strengthens the government’s standing while eroding the rule of law, its human rights standing and the household economy, and the tax structure it has built cannot absorb any of that.
Will a Parliamentary Election be a Solution to the Problem?
Victor Ivan evaluates whether holding a parliamentary general election will resolve the political deadlock between the President and the Prime Minister. Using electoral data under Sri Lanka’s Proportional Representation system, Ivan projects that neither a PA-JVP alliance nor the UNF can win an absolute parliamentary majority on its own. Consequently, any future government will be forced to rely on Tamil representatives from the North and East—most notably the LTTE-backed TNA—to form a majority. Ivan warns that this creates a severe governance paradox: a government reliant on LTTE-aligned MPs for its survival would struggle to credibly negotiate peace with the LTTE while maintaining public trust, ultimately leading to an even deeper political stalemate than before.