On stability of tangent bundles of Fano manifolds with b₂=1

In the present paper we discuss stability of the tanget bundle of a Fano n-fold of index >= n-2 and b_2=1. For example, we prove that all Fano 4-folds with b_2=1 have stable tangent bundle. For this purpose we prove some vanishing theorems for sheaves of twisted holomorphic forms on ample divisors and cyclic coverings of manifolds having "special cohomology".