Book describes the history of Sri Lanka from the time of birth of Lord Buddha and today's politics. Sri Lanka is formally known as Ceylon. Sri Lanka has gone through 70 years of unrest as a result of cultural divisions. The book describes the political events of past 70 years in Sri Lanka that resulted in major violence and deaths among the groups and ultimately running into a state of financial Bankruptcy. Sri Lanka is a good example and should be an eye opener for other countries.
Sri Lanka is a plural society country with Sinhala speaking Buddhist people in 70% majority. One person one vote political system always allowed a certain class of people to be in power. Sinhala Buddhism Supremacy became the core agenda for the successive governments since 1948; motivated by violent Sinhala Buddhist clergy class who were antidemocratic, anti pluralist and aspire to convert Sri Lanka into a homogenized singular nation with one religion, one culture, and one race all wrapped around politicized Sinhala Buddhism.
We see such problems in several other non-homogeneous countries such as in India, Malaysia including USA where governance is based on a system of "one vote one person". One can see the trend in US with growing different groups and agendas. Western Democracy principal is based on one person one vote always results in majority group suppressing the rights of the minority groups. Minority rights ignored. Votes become a tradeable commodity; wealthy and politically connected groups take advantage buying votes and get into power.