The end of an era of extremism
From the Mahavamsa to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Victor Ivan follows one line of thought through Sri Lankan history and argues that the era it produced is now, at last, ending.
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.
What may happen?
The winner has the cake and it is not edible. Victor Ivan describes a government that has taken enormous power at exactly the moment power stops being worth having.
Stark darkness
The voters believed they were electing a strongman who would rescue them. Victor Ivan describes a country sliding into a bottomless pit while neither its navigators nor its passengers can see what is ahead.
Added to the pandemic, a constitutional crisis
Parliament dissolved, an election impossible, and the president’s spending power expiring on 30 April. Victor Ivan sets out the constitutional deadlock the pandemic created, alongside the communal poison it released.
Understanding the puzzles of history
Victor Ivan goes back to the chronicles: how ethnic groups and religions formed on the island, what the South Indian invasions actually did, and how monks writing history shaped the way Sri Lankans think now.
Darkness and light
A monk asks the diaspora for dollars to keep the government running. Victor Ivan sets the new president’s inheritance against the Yahapalana years and against the murder of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Unanswered question
North and east voted one way, the Sinhala south the other. Victor Ivan takes the ethnic arithmetic of the 2019 result as the unanswered question of Sri Lankan politics: how to make one nation out of three electorates.
’56 reborn
Gotabaya Rajapaksa won without the minorities. Victor Ivan reads the result as a second 1956 — a Sinhala-Buddhist revival in new clothes — and asks what kind of leader the country has just demanded.
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.