He pried into the lives of the corrupt politicians and exposed them. He was a force in this little island when he made ‘Ravaya’- an alternative newspaper – a sort-after publication. There are stories that he had troubled times when financial struggles made paying the salaries of journalists who worked for him unthinkable. But this shrewd man made arrangements to keep journalists in the profession and roll out Ravaya from the printing press to ensure the publication continuously hit the newspaper stands. Those arrangements he made were frowned upon by his critics, but taking help to run his newspaper didn’t change this man into a ‘softie’, who meekly follows government guidelines to put out a tamed publication.
His pet subject was politics. His close colleagues remember him as a provincial leader of the JVP who had the ability to quickly and convincingly put his opinion on the table; whether delivering a speech or during rare moments when discussion was encouraged during the insurgent uprisings. We cannot forget the fact that Victor was tasked with the duty of making bombs during the insurgency. It was one of the experiments while making a bomb that cost the flexibility in his hands dearly. In the eyes of the people who stood by the principles of religion and democracy, Victor wasn’t a good man. But later in life he reformed. Literature about this legend reveals that ‘his intellectual pursuits were greatly influenced by the work of Bertrand Russell and Mahatma Gandhi and this reflected in both his professional and personal life’. This is great for a man who closely followed the careers of politicians as his profession and wrote about a breed which never reformed or got rid of their childish ways of being greedy for fame, money and power. Politicians could take a cue from Victor about changing for the better.
Politicians fear the man who they cannot change or convert into their line of thinking. True, Victor helped Chandrika Kumaratunga to assume political power in 1994. The problem with lawmakers is that they use journalists to assume power and then turn against them when the same scribes start critisising the regime. Victor’s answer to this was a book he penned under the name ‘Queen of deceit’ (Chaura Rajina) - a publication which exposes all the wrongdoings of President Kumaratunga. Through the book he gave a strong message to all lawmakers; don’t mess with journalists/writers!
Victor was intelligent enough to realise, early as a youth, that the JVP insurgency was a ‘foolish dream’. He then left the party and joined mainstream politics. His first attempt at engaging in full time politics was when he contested from the LSSP ticket in Galle for the provincial Council elections. He lost. But what made him a winner was that he had embraced neutral thinking. That was a time when the JVP ideology was converting minds of the youth with ease and planting the seeds of destruction. This is a past even which the present JVP led NPP hierarchy refuses to throw into the dustbin of politics.
Victor’s change from being a rebel to a reformer was genuine. Rights activist Sunanda Deshappriya in a tribute (Shared on Facebook on 19-1-2025) penned on Victor writes: “When Victor started Ravaya, he invited me and said ‘come on board and write. There is room for pieces where opinion may differ”. This is the society which we must create; a society which learns to accommodate others with opposing views. Deshapriya, in this piece of writing, states that while contributing to the Ravaya newspaper, he could write pieces which even contradicted what Victor Ivan was writing.
This writer had a brief telephone conversation with Victor many years ago when the latter’s son -Athula Russell- was playing competitive chess in Sri Lanka. Athula, arguably at that time, which was in early 2000, was the man to beat in chess, in Sri Lanka. There was something about Athula; just like his father. Athula had created some controversy in a chess tournament (he was hitting the table with his hand and not the button of the chess clock which is used to monitor the duration of chess games) hence the need for arbitors at the tournament to step in and offer a solution. Now in chess the arbitors are the players in the tournament themselves and Victor had an issue understanding this. So he got journalist, author and former employee of the Ravaya newspaper Manjula Wediwardene to speak to me and I explained the procedure. The good thing about that episode was that both these men were very intelligent and understood matters fast. There was nothing vindictive in the newspaper the next day regarding the issue at the tournament. The beauty is that the intelligent person becomes a blotting paper and goes into listening mode when he knows that he doesn’t know and accepts that he must learn what he doesn’t know, fast.
These days I’m reading content from his coffee table book ‘Paradise in tears’- which is a photo essay about Sri Lanka covering a period from 1800 to 1994. He also wrote many other books and even touched on the caste system prevailing in Sri Lanka through two books; one being ‘The revolt in the temple’ and the other being ‘Caste family and politics’. Victor had his journalism net well spread in society and found interesting titbits which he turned into content after much research.
What were Victor’s thoughts during death? This is such an interesting question for this scribe, but with regard to Victor, no one knows. Sunanda Deshapriya in his piece on Victor writes: “We might not agree with his politics. We don’t have to believe in all his ideologies. We are not enlightened beings”. Victor was reformed to be an accommodating man, if not an enlightened being. Maybe his fiery personality didn’t allow him to be transformed into a personality that had no ‘ego’. That would have been ‘death’ coming to him before he physically died. We know that Victor, till the time of his death, was vocal and critical about the wrongdoings in the system and the flaws of any government. The opinion he formed had weight. But his life experiences probably tuned his mind to a frequency to let go eventually and make life as light as a feather. Go well ‘legend’. You have etched your signature in journalism so profoundly that it should remain for a very long time.⍐
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