First, rescue Parliament, then the country
Johan Galtung once told Victor Ivan what Sri Lanka would become. Thirty years on the column takes that forecast as its starting point and argues the Parliament must be rescued before the country can be.
What if everyone fails?
With every institution of the state failed, Victor Ivan asks who is left. He measures Champika Ranawaka against the standard and finds an educated man who is still, in his judgment, a tribal leader.
Recreating the State
Answering the response to ‘End of an era’, Victor Ivan sets out the changes themselves — an itemised programme for rebuilding the state, from investigating the presidents to regulating the broadcasters.
Perfecting the failure
Gotabaya is failing, Victor Ivan writes, but so is the state he inherited. The column ends on the case of Shani Abeysekera and what happens to a country when its courts stop administering justice.
End of an era
The state the British handed over in 1948 has finished collapsing, Victor Ivan writes. Elections now decide not only who governs but who gets to plunder — and the era that began at independence ends in 2020.
Making the nation a bunch of morons
A school system built on memorising, and a country that has stopped being able to reason. Victor Ivan argues the damage runs from Grade 1 to the way Sri Lanka has understood the pandemic.
The revolution betrayed and the fate of Sri Lanka
Not the voters but their leaders were the fools of 2015. Victor Ivan calls the good-governance years a betrayed revolution and traces the counter-revolution it made inevitable.
2015, a dilemma; 2020, a flummox
Victor Ivan reads the Gotabaya government as the logical product of the good-governance years that preceded it — the narrowed agenda, the black money, the commissions that never worked.
Prime factors of the crisis
The pandemic did not cause this. Victor Ivan takes the crisis apart into its four components — the social order, the riots, the political system and the economy — and gives the remedy for each in brief.
Anarchy, dictatorship and the Constitution
Everyone is watching the 20th Amendment; Victor Ivan is watching the whirlwind behind it, which he expects to destroy both the remaining democracy and the dictatorial ambitions at once.