Bystander trauma: A tale of two countries

George Floyd's death in the US; Muslim lynchings in India

Photo by Luis Galvez on Unsplash

The closing of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin’s trial is a good moment to consider bystander trauma and what it says about a people, as well as their country’s likely trajectory.

Until the closing arguments on Monday, April 19, the trial had gone on three weeks. One week into it, witnesses to the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, started to describe their pain and guilt about not being able to save him.

As The New York Times reporter in Minneapolis put it, each witness showed “the burden of being a bystander to a violent, slow-motion death, and the crippling self-doubt that followed”.

This was repeated in various ways throughout the Chauvin trial.

The evident bystander trauma of those people in Minneapolis was moving. But it was especially interesting when contrasted with how little bystander trauma is reported from Narendra Modi’s muscularly Hindu new India.

There, as Samar Harlarnkar has written, Hindu radicalisation has progressed, as…