Avoiding essential reforms
The surface fire is out; the fire under the ashes is not. Victor Ivan compares Sri Lanka’s failure to build a nation with Gandhi’s approach in India, and asks why the necessary reforms are still being avoided.
Sri Lanka needs urgent surgery!
Sri Lanka needs emergency surgery, not an election, Victor Ivan writes — and he is careful to say what he means by surgery, what diagnosis must come first, and what the next president will actually be able to do.
The crisis and constitutional violations
Every branch of the state has broken the Constitution, Victor Ivan argues — and he traces the habit from the disenfranchisement of the plantation Tamils under Soulbury to the amendments that followed 1977.
Overcoming wretchedness
What the country needs now is not an election but structural change, Victor Ivan argues — and he describes trying, and failing, to get that point onto the agenda of a meeting of party leaders.
Sri Lanka: Out of the frying pan into the fire
Victor Ivan looks at what the Easter attacks have done to the Muslim community and to the state’s intelligence services, and asks whether a country that has swum in blood for three decades can escape the cycle.
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.
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.
Exploitation of rural women
Microfinance, invented to lift the very poor, has become in Sri Lanka a machine for stripping them. Victor Ivan reports from Polonnaruwa and Vavuniya on rural women trapped by collateral-free loans they never used to earn.
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.