Silence Must End
This article addresses Sri Lanka’s intellectual stagnation, arguing that high literacy rates mask a deeply backward social consciousness starved of meaningful public debate. Contrasting Sri Lanka’s superficial modernism with Europe’s Enlightenment and India’s inclusive movement under Mahatma Gandhi, the author criticizes Sri Lanka’s past reform attempts for fragmenting society along racial, religious, and class lines. The text delivers a sharp warning to the educated class, asserting that their persistent silence and fear of controversy create a dangerous vacuum—one historically filled by violent extremists like Wijeweera and Prabhakaran—and calls on intellectuals to fulfill their civic duty by sparking dynamic social discussion across all areas of national life.
The dilemma of independence
More than five decades have passed since independence, and the fifty-fourth anniversary has to be marked with sadness rather than pleasure. What the country has done with its freedom, measured against the neighbours who started level with it, is the subject.
Importance of democracy within a party
There is a real discussion in the country about broadening democratic freedom and the reforms it needs, and almost all of it is about how to reform the state. The parties, which are the state’s main instrument, are doing nothing to strengthen democracy inside themselves.
Ranil’s dilemma: Party or himself
The government avoided defeat on the budget without finding out who was adding to the four members of Thondaman’s group who had agreed to vote it down, and without uniting its own ranks against a repeat. The instability that produced is the setting for a question about the opposition leader.
Exorcise the evil system
Sri Lanka signed the United Nations convention against inhuman and degrading treatment in January 1994 and passed an Act to give effect to it in November of the same year. What has happened since to the people the Act was written for is the subject of the column.
Playing it right in the political arena
Unlike Jayewardene and Premadasa, President Kumaratunga did not come to power after long effort and sacrifice; she came to it by fortunate circumstance. What she did come to power on was a democratic political discourse — and this column measures her against it.
A society without a conscience
What Sri Lanka faces is a crisis of conscience. The things that separate a man from an animal are the ability to think independently and the conscience — and the organisations that exist to exercise both have gone quiet at exactly the moments they were needed.
Hatred: barrier for fruitful talks
Will the Ranil-Chandrika dialogue change the political picture? Will it produce even a consensus on the ethnic crisis that has gone on destroying life? Not, Ivan argues, while the hatred each side has cultivated for the other is the one thing both of them still hold in common.
Tapping for gossip not national security
The telephone was once a status symbol; now it is how people talk, and the computer and e-mail will follow it into every house. In a country facing a real threat to national security, the intelligence service is reportedly being used to listen to political gossip rather than to investigate the threats.
WANTED: An organized civil movement
This article delivers a scathing critique of “crony capitalism” in Sri Lanka, a deeply entrenched system of state plunder initiated under former President J.R. Jayewardene. The author expresses profound disillusionment with the newly elected People’s Alliance government, arguing that instead of dismantling this corrupt network and recovering stolen national wealth, the new leadership has simply embraced the same wealthy elites who bankrolled their rise to power, leaving the public’s demand for justice unfulfilled.