ජනමාධ්යවල සමාජ වගකීම
The coarseness ruling Sri Lankan politics is equally visible in the media, and in the temple, the church and the courts. Journalists are the teachers of modern society, but teachers without learning, training or reading do damage. Television and radio carry almost nothing of intellectual value: political discussion programmes pick guests the way a cockfight picks birds, and a presenter succeeds by turning the discussion into a brawl. Stations chase audiences with giveaways rather than quality, some pushing the foolish belief that listening all day can make you a millionaire. Ivan argues the media could fill the gap left by the absence of career guidance in schools — European countries want skilled tradesmen more than professionals, and nurses trained here cannot work abroad because their training omits English. Channels teach French and Italian cooking; few Sri Lankans can cook rice properly or make a decent cup of tea.
අශීලාචාර තැනක තිබෙන්නේ දේශපාලනය පමණක්ද?
A satirical column by Vimalanath Weeraratne about Ivan’s role in securing the Lanka editor’s release provoked a crisis at Ravaya: Ivan announced he would stop writing for the paper, and Janaranjana offered to resign as acting head of the editorial board before the matter was settled. Ivan defends his interventions with the President — for the Lanka editor, for Parameshwari, for a detained astrologer — and denies rumours that his son was sent abroad at state expense. He then turns on his own profession, arguing journalists are as disreputable as politicians: the fabricated story of Premadasa bathing in milk drew condemnation for the attack on the printing press but none for the reporting that provoked it, and foreign-registered websites now let anyone publish gutter journalism beyond reach of the law. He closes with his own inquiries into Prageeth Eknaligoda’s disappearance.
ජෙනරාල් අත්අඩංගුවට ගැනීම
The timing and manner of Fonseka’s arrest were both wrong. He took 40 votes in every hundred cast against the winner’s 57 — 4,173,185 against 6,015,934 — which makes him, whatever his background, the country’s second accepted leader. Arresting the loser at the close of a presidential election looks like reprisal, and looks worse still while he is challenging the result in court: a move to block the election petition. Military law should apply to serving soldiers, and Fonseka has retired; offences discovered after retirement, if criminal, belong in the ordinary courts. The government has stained its own victory and made a new hero of the man the voters rejected, and his wife Anoma will become a political figure carrying the grievance from platform to platform. The president stopped two earlier attempts at this arrest and was abroad for the third; correcting it is his responsibility, and a test of his character. The example to follow is Dutugemunu’s treatment of the defeated Elara.
ජය – පරාජය
The presidential contest can only end with one man winning and the other losing, and the system is built so that struggle runs on hatred rather than argument. Rajapaksa and Fonseka fought Prabhakaran on the same side and praised each other publicly; now each sees a traitor across the field, and the public that cheered both has split into camps that regard the other candidate with the loathing once reserved for Prabhakaran. Given that venom, the losing leader and his senior followers will face reprisal whoever wins. The press profits by fanning it. Beneath this lies a system that keeps one party in power for decades — seventeen years to the first change of government, sixteen so far for this one — long enough for the bureaucracy and police to make common cause with whoever rules.
පළිගැනීම
An opposition member of parliament whose house and office were burned says the police will not arrest anyone, and has taken to smashing coconuts at shrines instead. Ivan follows the wheel through the UNP’s seventeen years and the years after 1994, when each side in turn played avenger and victim, and asks when the country will be free of this politics.
ජාතික ගීතය හා දෙමළ සන්ධානය
The Tamil National Alliance’s councillors in Vavuniya took their oaths to the national anthem, which Ivan reads as an important signal. He traces the anthem’s rejection to the Vaddukoddai resolution of 1976, after which the Federal Party and the Tamil United Liberation Front stopped using it and the LTTE banned it in northern schools, and asks the alliance not to stop there.
නිල බලය අයථා ලෙස පාවිච්චි කිරීමට ඉඩදිය යුත්තේ ඇයි?
Six junior officers have been transferred over the abduction and assault of a student at the Malabe technology institute, but the head of the Colombo crime division who directed it has faced nothing. Ivan argues the country needs as firm a policy towards educated men who abuse official power as it does towards uneducated criminals, and asks why the police chief has not acted on the defence secretary’s instruction.
ජාතිවාදය බෙදුම්වාදය හා කල්ලිවාදය
Ivan takes the president’s promise that there will be no more room for separatism — and,
importantly, for racism — as the right formula, since each feeds the other. The victory
should produce humility rather than triumph, and the test of it is whether wrong opinions
are defeated by argument rather than by threat, and whether thinkers, journalists and
artists can say what they think without fear for their lives.
දෙමළ ප්රශ්නය ජයගැනීම
The price of defeating the LTTE is not yet countable, Ivan writes, but the harder question
is what follows: how to heal a community that has paid an enormous forfeit and now carries a
defeated mind. The Tamils hold an old language and an old civilisation, and cannot be
governed by force against their will; the road out begins when Sinhalese hearts set down the
victor’s pride.
යාල්දේවී නැවත ඇරඹීම
Ivan reads the decision to restore the Yal Devi line to the north as symbolic as much as
economic, and proposes that the sleepers be paid for village by village — each temple,
church, school and workshop buying one marked with its name — so that the south has a hand
in rebuilding the north. What the north needs now, he writes, alongside development and
elections, is kindness.