The Prime Minister won the elections on the wave of progress, and keeping silent on issues that are causing a sense of unrest among the people will not help in anyway
ROBERT CLEMENTS
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here’s a disquieting situation in India: On one hand there’s an articulate prime minister, excellent with his rhetoric, forceful in his content, a crowd mover with his speeches, gestures and eyeballing, and on the other hand, same man, stone faced in deathly silence.
The preposterous love-jihad silence!
Re-conversions-silence!
Un-holidaying Christmas-Silence!
And a host of other statements and movements all met with a deathly hush: One that is getting louder than the million words he utters, non-stop!
It’s his silence that once made him unloved by the world.
It’s his silence he will finally have to be answerable to!
It’s his silence that people still speak about in his home state during the 2002 riots!
Thousands of years ago, Nero, the emperor of Rome is supposed to have played the fiddle while Rome burned. Nero focused much of his attention on diplomacy, trade and enhancing the cultural life of the Empire. He ordered theaters built and promoted athletic games.
During his reign, the redoubtable general Corbulo conducted a successful war and negotiated peace with the Parthian Empire. His general Suetonius Paulinus crushed a revolt in Britain. Nero annexed the Bosporan Kingdom to the Empire and began the First Roman-Jewish War.
In 64 AD, most of Rome was destroyed in the Great Fire of Rome, which many Romans believed Nero himself had started in order to clear land for his planned palatial complex, the Domus Aurea. He is infamously known as the Emperor who “fiddled while Rome burned”.
He was rumored to have had captured Christians dipped them in oil, then set them on fire in his garden at night as a source of light!
The difference between Nero’s times and today’s is that news travels faster.
Tweets, Facebook and the Internet carry news to the ends of the earth in a split second, but when Twitter, Facebook and the Internet which are constantly used by the PM, on every other occasion are not used to give his comments on what citizens of India feel that comments are needed on, then that silence is worse than the distant, historic sound of Nero’s fiddle!
The Prime Minister rode the elections on the wave of progress, and keeping silent on issues that are causing a sense of unrest among the minorities will not help in anyway.
Break your silence, Mr Prime Minister, and let us hear your voice on issues that are slowly becoming burning ones.
Silence isn’t always golden sometimes. It’s plain yellow!
