It was a gut-wrenching two days. Between March 29 and March 30, the Karwan e Mohabbat team met nine families in Haryana’s Mewat region who had lost loved ones to hate murders of another kind.
For some weeks, India’s glittering hub of information technology, industry and finance near Delhi was shrouded in fear and animosity.
A fact-finding mission led by a group of activists tried to piece together the circumstances leading to the deaths of three girls.
By affirming that he bore Muslims no ill will, Yashpal Saxena, whose only son Ankit Saxena was murdered by the family of the Muslim girl he loved, demolished one of the most widely used rationalisations for communal hatred.
There has been an unusual spurt of interest in the higher civil services in recent weeks, for many reasons.
Never in any of his election speeches did Rahul Gandhi use the M word – Muslim. He did not touch once upon the gruesome massacre of 2002 under the watch of Modi.
What much of India barely acknowledges is that the Indian state has substantially transmuted into a hard, majoritarian Hindu state which is callous to, and sometimes even at war with, its minorities.
As the grim threat of lynching casts a terrifying shadow over large swathes of the country, directions from India’s Supreme Court to all governments to take steps to prevent what it described as “horrendous acts of mobocracy” can only be welcomed.
Amidst the clamour for retribution, we must listen carefully to the gentle voices that talk of forgiveness and compassion. These alone light the way to locate, deep within ourselves, our own capacities for goodness.
The people of Assam are sitting atop a smouldering volcano, one that threatens to erupt into catastrophic suffering and injustice.