නිල්වලා ගඟේ අයිතිය කිඹුලන්ට!
A column of shorter pieces. Ivan mocks a conservation policy that has handed the Nilwala River to man-eating crocodiles while villagers who kill them are prosecuted; asks again why people dying of kidney disease in Rajarata still have no filtered water; argues that the media, rather than simply rejecting the government’s code of ethics, should adopt codes binding owners as well as journalists; cautions, after Snowden, that states will police cyberspace because future wars will be fought there; and urges building expressways over double-tracked railways free of level crossings.
අරාජිකත්වයේ අභියෝගය
Ivan reads the weeks since Vesak as signs of a country drifting into anarchy: rotten institutions are collapsing with nothing to replace them. A monk’s staged self-immolation, sold to television by a journalist as an exclusive; a Deputy Inspector General, Vass Gunawardena, exposed as a kidnapper and contract killer; the fusion of politicians and the criminals who guarded them during the insurgencies; and a push to scrap the Thirteenth Amendment unilaterally. He traces Indo-Lankan hostility to the UNP’s 1977 insults to Indira Gandhi and warns that breaking the Accord would complete the slide.
මැරෙන්නට ඉඩ හැර බලා සිටීම
The chronic kidney disease killing people in the former border villages of the North Central Province draws less attention than stray dogs or cattle bound for slaughter, the paper says. At the very least the government should supply water through heavy-metal filters — not a Rs 35 million tank at Padaviya fed from the same groundwater doctors warn against — and, if no quick cure is found, resettle people on safer land. A society that lets them die, it concludes, is not a human one.
මගේ සිහිනය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to readers’ reactions to his plan to reorganise Ravaya, Ivan explains his habit of seeing things unconventionally, as Gandhi and Mandela did, and sets his plan against his forecast that Sri Lanka is heading for anarchy. After Prabhakaran’s defeat the political system stood exposed; Mahinda Rajapaksa, the only leader left, failed to rebuild the state, and parties on both sides are historically spent. With a monk’s self-immolation over cattle slaughter and the row over the Thirteenth Amendment as signs, he argues Ravaya must be strengthened to guide readers through the coming collapse.
අධිවේග මාර්ග හා දැක්මේ තිබෙන පුංචිකම
Recalling Lalith Athulathmudali’s dream of an expressway joining Hambantota and Jaffna through Colombo, Ivan contrasts the British road and rail network, the best in South Asia at independence, with the neglect that followed, as J.R. Jayewardene poured money into an airline against Lee Kuan Yew’s advice. The Southern Expressway is fast, he says, but serves the car-owning rich; built over a modernised double-track railway it would have needed no land acquisition and served the poor too. On his reckoning it will take two centuries to repay.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (2)
Ivan argues that British rule transformed Ceylon’s economy and state but left its thinking feudal. Europe’s Renaissance and liberal philosophers — Copernicus to Locke and Mill — remade how people thought as well as how they lived; India’s Congress, under Gandhi and Nehru, used the freedom struggle itself as a revolution in thought against caste and communalism. Ceylon, handed independence on a tray, had only Buddhist and Hindu revivals that fought Christian dominance but, trapped by caste and unlike Ram Mohan Roy’s, never turned their criticism inward.
ඉතිහාසය නැවත සලකා බැලීමක්
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s institutions are collapsing without anything new taking their place: the UNP and SLFP are historically spent, having built and then gorged on a predatory executive presidency, and the country runs like a bolting horse. To read the present he turns to the past, rejecting the anti-imperial myth that colonialism ruined a prosperous island. The Colebrooke–Cameron reforms freed people from caste service and built a unified modern state; the failure to unite the nation and democratise society belongs to Sri Lanka’s own leaders.
බොරුව හා රැවටිල්ල ජාතික ලක්ෂණයක්ද?
Ivan asks whether deceit is a national habit, and finds it at every turn of modern history: D.S. Senanayake’s staged ‘farmers’ and the governor-generalship promised to Lord Soulbury, the 1962 ‘gin-and-tonic’ coup plot, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only opportunism, and John D’Oyly’s bloodless capture of Kandy in 1815, whose native helpers’ descendants became the independence elite. Drawing on Marshall Singer, Henpitagedara Gnanaseeha and Robert Knox, he argues that leaders and people have deceived each other on language and religion until the country fell into an abyss.
වරද කාගේද?
Ivan traces Sri Lanka’s three constitutions to argue that each was made by whichever party held the numbers, without the consensus a constitution demands. The Soulbury order, flawed but workable, let governments fall; Colvin R. de Silva’s 1972 constitution stripped away its safeguards and ignored the Tamil language question; J.R. Jayewardene’s 1978 system put all power in one unaccountable man. Yet the fault, he concludes, is not J.R.’s alone but a society given independence as a gift, democratic on the surface and feudal at the core.