India, Jan. 12 -- Kapil Mishra is today the Law Minister of the Delhi government. As a local politician, he knows northeast Delhi well. He also knows what happened there in 2000, when communal violence ripped through neighbourhoods, killing 53 people, destroying livelihoods, and leaving thousands roofless. Hundreds of children were orphaned or traumatised for life. That tragedy was not an abstraction for many of us. It was a lived reality.

At the time, I was heading an NGO. We decided that outrage alone was not enough. We started a small facility inside one of the refugee colonies to take care of traumatised children. Our teachers worked with them every day, trying to restore a semblance of normalcy-routine, laughter, learning-to young l...