A mass campaign is needed to convince the Sinhalese majority that devolution and democratisation are in its interest as much as they are in the interest of Sri Lanka's minorities.
The political right and left around the globe seem to concur in linking democracy to bourgeois rule; the two concepts have even been hyphenated in the adjective 'bourgeois-democratic'. Yet history gives us no reason to believe that there is a necessary connection between the two. It is true that when the bourgeoisie is fighting against feudal power to establish its rule, it seeks the support of the plebeian masses, and in the process allows them to fight for their own demands – hence the famous slogan of the French Revolution, 'Liberty, Equality and Fraternity'. Yet once their rule is established, they are quite capable of turning on their erstwhile allies, repressing or even slaughtering them. This is not to say that capitalism is incompatible with democratic rights and freedoms, but to emphasise that the latter will prevail only if the working people fight to establish and defend them. Even in advanced capitalist countries, long-established rights can quickly be demolished. Social Democracy in Germany was followed by fascism; even today, democratic rights are under attack in the heartlands of capitalism.
In the former colonies, there was likewise a popular movement for liberation from imperialism. This was often followed by a sense of disappointment when, though independence was won, the condition of the working masses remained little changed. Again, the illusion that democracy is the free gift of the bourgeoisie, or a necessary condition of their rule, is responsible for this disappointment. Alternatively, there has been a tendency, shared by both Maoists and Trotskyists, to deny that a bourgeois revolution has taken place or that capitalism is developing. A more realistic view would be to recognise that, for the working class, independence from colonialism is only the first of many battles for democracy.
The most common popular definition of democracy equates it with elections and parliamentary rule. While having elections is better than not having them, this system of representative democracy is, even at its best, the rule of a minority. The representatives who are elected – and they tend to come from the wealthier strata of society – can go on to do largely whatever they like, with little reference to the wishes of their constituents; indeed, there is very little the latter can do about it until the next elections. If, as in the US, there is a powerful president who is elected by a complicated system that allows a candidate with a smaller proportion of the popular vote to win, or, as in the first-past-the-post system, a government can be formed by a party that gets fewer votes than one of its opponents, the representative character of the government becomes even more tenuous.