The crisis of not having mature leaders
Six opposition leaders, all of them products of the old order. Victor Ivan asks what a mature leader would look like and why the post-independence period has produced so few.
Perfecting the failure
Anarchy, bankruptcy, a misread geopolitics and a Geneva resolution. Victor Ivan reads the failure of the state as something now being completed rather than merely risked.
The end of a journey and beginning of a new one
Anti-Muslim feeling, the forced cremations, and what Victor Ivan says the National Intelligence Service did. The column argues the old era has ended and asks what should be built in its place.
More about the ‘end of an era of extremism’
A sequel to the previous week’s column. Victor Ivan goes back to Turnour’s Mahavamsa, to Anagarika Dharmapala and to the growth of literacy to show where Sinhala-Buddhist racism got its history from.
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.
Dr. Neville Fernando and Lankan politics
A conversation from 1991 with Dr. Neville Fernando, recalled at his death, in which a government backbencher explained how Parliament was bought — and why, Victor Ivan argues, it has never recovered.
Lost hopes of freedom
On the 73rd independence anniversary, Victor Ivan traces the country back to 1815 and the Colebrooke reforms to ask how a state that began ahead of Asia ended at the bottom of it.
Structural reforms key to recreating the State and the social system
COVID as an index of state failure. Victor Ivan reads the handling of the pandemic, the soldiers placed over the civil service and the growing dependence on China as symptoms of one structural collapse.
The right thing to do
A president with no political education, an opposition Victor Ivan calls stupid, and a civil service filling up with soldiers. The column ends with a programme of reforms to be completed before any further election.
Alas, Sri Lanka!
Victor Ivan recounts taking the collapse of the state to the Speaker, to the Auditor General and finally to the Supreme Court with 62 signatures behind him, and being met each time with silence.