On this day in 1915 Ottoman Turkey initiated the annihilation of its most industrious minority. What ensued was a protracted operation to slaughter an entire people out of existence. Its meticulousness, presaging the bloodiest century in human history, drove the outstanding Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin to coin the term “genocide” and enshrine it as a crime in international law.
Thirty-four countries will today remember the Armenian Genocide. India will not number among them. Russia and the United States, effectively at war in Ukraine, will unite briefly to mourn the organised murder of more than 1.5 million Armenians by imperial Turkey. The world’s most populous democracy, however, will keep its lips sealed in order not to displease the genocide-deniers in Ankara.
High officials in New Delhi whom I’ve canvassed on this matter rationalise India’s position as being merely “status quoist”. That phrase sounds increasingly like a convenient euphemism for an official attitude animated by cravenness and senselessness. India, home to Armenian communities for more than two thousand years, has a special obligation not only to acknowledge but perhaps even to atone for one of history’s gravest crimes.
Gandhi blinded to truth
At the summit of the atrocities against the Armenians, Mahatma Gandhi took great pains to contrive mitigations for Turkish genocidaires. Having sought to recruit the most hidebound Indian Muslims into the freedom movement by staging a ruinous agitation to preserve the Caliphate, Gandhi became captive to it. Indian Muslims, he wrote, “must resist the studied attempt to humiliate Turkey and therefore Islam, under the false pretext of ensuring Armenian independence”. He refused to regard the Ottoman Empire as an imperial enterprise, doubted whether its Arab and Christian subjects sincerely wished to part company with Turkey, and expressed scepticism about the reports of Armenian massacres and imputed their proliferation to “Armenian-financed propaganda”.
Gandhi had blinded himself to the truth. The carnage that began in 1915 was not an aberration—it was the culmination of a long homicidal yearning. As Christians in the Muslim empire, Armenians were subject to special taxes. As a people with a glorious past, they invited resentment and suspicion. That Armenians thrived in spite of such prejudice is a tribute to their ingenuity, and not the tolerance of the Ottoman authorities.
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Defeat, death and betrayal
In the late 19th century, Sultan Abdul Hamid II, a vicious Armenophobe, banned the use of the word “Armenia” in textbooks before presiding over the killing of tens of thousands of Armenians. The apparently “progressive” Young Turks who deposed him proceeded to finish what he had begun.
On 24 April 1915—citing the Ottoman rout at Sarikamish, where a small minority of “treasonous” Armenians had picked up arms for Russia—Turkey detained the most eminent members of Istanbul’s Armenian community, banished them to distant places, and had them killed. In the months that followed, this savage exercise—detention, deportation, murder—was replicated against Armenian communities elsewhere in the empire.
Hundreds of Armenians were bound by chain or rope, bundled into carts, and carried into the desert, where Kurds and Turkish gendarmes enacted horrifying brutalities. Men were knifed, shot dead or dropped from great heights. Children’s heads were smashed against rocks. Women were stripped, molested, and then beheaded with axes.
“When our mother came for the last time and kissed us madly, I remember she was clad only in her white underwear; there were no ornaments, no gold and no velvet clothes,” Mkrtich Karapetian, a survivor, recorded. “We, the children, were unaware of the events happening there. In reality, they had taken off their clothes, one after the other, had arranged the garments on one side, had stripped the women completely, had cut their heads with axes and had thrown them into the valley.”
The Turkish government, having long depicted Armenians as a grasping and greedy people, attempted to claim the life insurance benefits of the Armenians it had killed. In the aftermath of the Turkish defeat in World War I, Allied powers proposed to partition the Ottoman Empire and restore Anatolia to the Armenians. But the promise of justice was shattered by Mustafa Kemal’s Nationalist rebellion. The man now revered as Ataturk, the father of the Turks, aimed then to destroy Armenia as a viable entity before its admission to the League of Nations.
In the summer of 1919, the only force that stood between Kemal’s revanchist Nationalists and the First Republic of Armenia—founded the year before—were two battalions of Indian soldiers who patrolled the ancient Armenian city of Kars under British command.
Once the Indians were relieved, Kemal’s invasion forces punched in, lining the streets and filling the rivers with more Armenian bodies—a continuation of the genocidal campaign begun in 1915—and reducing the young Armenian republic into an infeasible geopolitical anomaly.
For Armenia, defeat and death were braided together with betrayal. Moscow, having persuaded Armenia to submit to Soviet rule in return for guarantees of Russian protection, traded away Armenian lands to Turkey, which was reconstituted in 1923 as a modern secular state. Ottoman war criminals went on to serve its government.
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India’s silence
A century ago, Gandhi’s view of Armenia was shaped by a combination of ignorance, anti-colonial machinations, and myopia—but not malice. The Armenians, who erected his statue in their capital, seem to agree. Gandhi’s reflexive mistrust of western advocates of “self-determination” was vindicated by their express abandonment of Armenia—the only nation in the Caucasus that remained loyal to the Allied cause—at the Treaty of Lausanne, which returned Anatolia to Turkey.
What is harder to fathom and abide is the benightedness of contemporary India’s position on the Armenian Genocide. What conceivable benefit does India accrue by refusing to add its voice to the nations that memorialise it? Turkey and its client states certainly do not evince any hesitation in offending India and challenging its sovereignty. Even if they were deferential to India’s feelings, what really is the worth of any advantage obtained by persisting with this shameful silence about genocide?
Those who invoke the sanctity of “status quo” as an excuse for their silence seem not to appreciate that the Turkish—and Turkic—effort to exterminate Armenians is not an antique event. It is an ongoing endeavour. For the past five months, Azerbaijan has blockaded the breakaway Armenian republic of Nagorno-Karabakh. At least 1,50,000 Armenians are cut off from the world beyond—hostages to a dictatorial regime that feels sufficiently emboldened by the silence of major powers to raze irreplaceable Armenian heritage and threaten endless aggression against a defenceless democracy.
By recognising the Armenian Genocide, India may help foster a slow but certain reconciliation with the past; by staying quiet, it will become complicit in its swift repetition.
Kapil Komireddi is the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India. Follow him on Telegram (https://t.me/KapilKomireddi) The views expressed here are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)