Harsh Mander: India’s little-told stories of faith and forgiveness

We are living through profoundly troubled times. So much that is good and precious is badly broken – kindness, justice, love, courage, caring, compassion and empathy. There sometimes seems little hope that we can ever mend.

Look around us. An unarmed man is lynched to death by a crowd, screaming piteously for hours, yet we look away. Young couples who dare to cross the borders of religion and caste risk being slaughtered by mobs or even men of their own families in the name of family and community honour. A young girl is gang-raped, a schoolboy beaten to death by his schoolmaster, a bridegroom pulled off his wedding horse and killed for the supposed transgression of their caste.

In our land, it has become customary for the rest of us to look away as people of Muslim religious identity are being disenfranchised, their houses bulldozed, their worship criminalised, their citizenship rights trampled. Or when targeted people are pushed at gunpoint across international borders or tossed from naval boats into the deep sea.

Not just India. Look at the world today. A trillion dollars is the wealth of one single man. If he spends a million dollars every single day, it would take 2,700 years for his...

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