Toll from vigilante mobs rises, and India begins to recoil

For decades, one of the most commonplace news items from South Asia has been the “bus plunge.”

This sort of disaster happened so frequently that foreign correspondents had to choose among bus plunges, looking for something distinctive — the passengers were pilgrims or schoolchildren; the bus fell into a ravine, or a reservoir, or the sea — to find one that was especially noteworthy, meriting coverage in the newspaper.

It is a sign of the times, in India, that we must now do the same with lynchings.

Last Friday, I found myself weighing the newsworthiness of two mob killings in different parts of