Delhi man run over multiple times: What has made bystanders in our cities so insensitive?

If reports are to be believed a 35-year-old man’s badly mutilated corpse was discovered on a busy stretch in south Delhi, who might have been run over by multiple vehicles. The autopsy reports have suggested that dead person, who is yet to be identified, had been either been hit by a heavy vehicle, such as a 16-wheel truck vehicle, and dragged along for several metres or possibly crushed by multiple vehicles as his injured body lay on the road. One really wonders if no one cared to stop and do anything? If only such an accident could be written off as a once in a while anomaly.

In another incident of shocking public apathy on February 1, 18-year-old Anwar Ali, whose bicycle was hit by a bus, bled to death on a road in Karnataka as several bystanders simply watched and clicked photos of him, but none moved to his aid. Two days before that on January 30, Mahesh Kumar, a 38-year-old police officer was left trapped and bleeding in a mangled police jeep for nearly an hour after a road crash in Mysore. Critical life saving minutes were lost as the people who saw him surrounded the vehicle but did nothing to take him to the hospital. By the time he was finally brought to the hospital, it was too late. These are merely the most recent two reported incidents of absurd, apathetic bystander responses in big cities to helpless victims clearly in need of urgent response.

What do witnessing people wait around for? What is fascinating – and not grotesque – about simply watching life dissipate out of an individual? There are also cases where bystanders produced videos as a person was committing suicide, some man was being flogged and a victim was getting molested.

These incidents call into question how desensitised we as bystanders have become to ignore the dire need of victims of violence and accident. To be sure, it is not uncomplicated in India as many people have it hammered into them by now that helping strangers out of humanity can cause them to potentially get pulled into murky police cases and never ending court proceedings. This is the case even though the Supreme Court explicitly issued guidelines in March 2016 to protect bystander-helpers or good samaritans who aid victims in need.

Still, people are too afraid, too caught up in a warped thinking that encourages cowardice and chickening out from responding. But accidents and unjust, bad things can happen to anyone — including the bystander and their loved ones.

Perhaps it would be a valuable exercise in empathy to put the face of a friend or family member on the bodies of wounded victims, in case we find ourselves bystanders to a horror — before deciding the course of action.

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