Reforms or a revolution?
With the Rajapaksa brothers gone, the power struggle has taken a stranger shape. Victor Ivan examines the arrest of Wasantha Mudalige, the militant wing of the Aragalaya, and what lies outside the constitutional framework.
The crisis and Anura Kumara
Anura Kumara Dissanayake says the JVP is ready to lead. Victor Ivan, who knows the party’s history from the inside, weighs that claim against what its violence did to the country.
Lawful public uprising! (2)
Part two turns to why liberalism never took here. Victor Ivan sets the JVP and the LTTE side by side as movements that drove their own communities into racism.
Sri Lanka: Another cause for failure
Dharmapala and Marx, the Soulbury Constitution broken before the ink was dry, and the citizenship of the plantation workers. Victor Ivan traces the decline to the choices made at the moment of independence.
Foundations of incivility
Why does a country tolerate constitutional violation after constitutional violation without protest? Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the intellectual poverty of the Left, the language question and the habit of judicial silence.
Mr. NOTA and understanding the Presidential Election
India gives voters a ‘None Of The Above’ box. Victor Ivan proposes Sri Lanka field Mr. NOTA as a candidate in his own right — a vote for a new constitution rather than for any of the men on the ballot.
Failure of the Left Movement
From the Old Left’s Marxist head on a liberal trunk to the JVP after two insurrections, Victor Ivan asks why the Left has failed — and what the JVP should do with the presidential election in front of it.
ජාතිය ගොඩනැගීම
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka failed to meet two historical conditions for building a nation. The Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim leaders of the independence era were limited in outlook; liberal ideas came mainly through educated Burghers, while revivalists such as Migettuwatte Gunananda took another path. The left movement and the Jaffna Youth Congress briefly stood for a united nation. India, with its pluralist attitudes, built a nation and a democracy; Sri Lanka, by comparison, is in an ugly state.
සිංහල-බෞද්ධ මනස තේරුම් ගැනීම
Responding to Kusal Perera’s ‘In Search of the New Man’, Ivan revisits two debates: Newton Gunasinghe’s great and little traditions, which suggest Sinhala cultural narrowness belongs to the era of decline rather than all history, and Sarachchandra’s claim, contested by Martin Wickramasinghe, that Buddhism does not see art as purifying. Europe escaped a similar world-denial through the Renaissance; Sri Lanka’s revivals, independence movement and parties never produced one. Every movement from Dharmapala and Bandaranaike to Wijeweera and the JHU has pandered to the Sinhala-Buddhist mind, shaped by an island that kept its identity against India, rather than changing it.
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.