The Armenian Genocide — A Bitter Truth Buried in Silence!

By Shefali Vaidya

We didn’t hear of the Armenian Genocide in my school or college. It wasn’t part of any Indian history textbook or lecture.

The truth about Armenian Genocide came to me, through the silver screen—at a film festival in 2007, in the form of an Italian film called The Lark Farm.

A devastating, gut-wrenching film that shook me to the core. It told the story of an Armenian family caught in the whirlwind of the first and one of the most horrifying genocides of the 20th century. The setting was Anatolia, in present-day Turkey—a region once home to thousands of Armenian Christians who had lived there for generations. They spoke the Turkish tongue, ate Turkish food, and lived in harmony with their neighbours. But they were targeted by the Ottoman Turks. Their only ‘fault’? They were Christian. And the Ottoman rulers of Turkey were fanatical Islamists.

There is one scene in The Lark Farm that I will never forget.

The movie is set around the time of the First World War. All the Armenian men of the village—including young boys and infants—are rounded up and brutally murdered. The women—old, young, pregnant—are herded like cattle and forced to march across the scorching deserts of Syria with no food or water.

One such woman is heavily pregnant. She has just seen her husband, her brother-in-law, her father-in-law, and even her toddler son brutally butchered before her eyes. As she marches through the unforgiving terrain of the Syrian desert, she keeps whispering desperate prayers that her child should be a girl. Because if it’s a boy, the Turks will ensure he dies a horrible, painful death.

But fate is cruel.
She gives birth to a baby boy.

Even as she holds the fragile, wailing infant in her trembling arms, a fellow captive tells her, “What the Turks do to boys, you don’t want your son to endure.” The other women had seen it already—baby skulls smashed against rocks, infants set ablaze.

So, with a trembling heart and shaking hands, the mother makes the most harrowing choice any woman could make. With the help of the other women, she smothers her own newborn son to death. Not out of cruelty. But out of mercy. To spare him the unthinkable.

That scene broke me.
Even now, I can’t forget the look in that mother’s eyes.

At first, I thought it was dramatic licence. Cinematic exaggeration. Surely no human would be forced into such a nightmare? But being who I am, I went home and dug deeper. I researched. I read. I cried.

Because the truth was far, far worse than anything any film could show.

Between 1915 and 1923, over 1.5 million Armenian Christians were systematically slaughtered by the Ottoman Turks in a carefully planned, state-sponsored genocide. Armenian men were lined up and shot. Women were gang-raped. Children were thrown off cliffs or burned alive. Churches were razed. Hundreds of thousands of women and children were marched into the deserts of Syria without food or water and left to die.

Many women—because they were Christian—were raped and then crucified in the middle of the desert. Over 200,000 women and children were forcibly converted to Islam and distributed as slaves into Turkish Muslim households.

This was not a war.
This was not collateral damage.
This was the annihilation of an entire civilisation—its religion, its language, its memory—erased by the sword of religious fanaticism.

And even today, Turkey denies that the #ArmenianGenocide ever happened. Speak the words “Armenian Genocide” in Turkey, and you could be arrested under Article 301 of their Penal Code. Historians, journalists, and survivors have been silenced, harassed, and prosecuted.

But the world has not forgotten.

34 countries, including France, Russia, Germany, Canada, and—finally in 2021—the United States, have officially recognised the Armenian Genocide.

But India?
India, which has every reason to call out Islamist barbarity?

India remains silent.

If India truly wants to send a message to Turkey—a country that supplies drones to Pakistan and gives safe haven to radical Islamists—it must recognise the Armenian Genocide.

And now comes the uncomfortable truth that most Indian secularists will never want to confront.

While the deserts of Anatolia were soaked with the blood of innocent Armenians…
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—yes, the same ‘apostle of non-violence’ was busy trying to “save” the Ottoman Caliphate through the Khilafat Movement.

Let that sink in.

While Armenian women were being raped, their babies burned alive, their men butchered for being Christian—Gandhi and Maulana Azad were pleading for the preservation of the very Caliphate that ordered their deaths.

The same Ottoman Empire that crucified priests in public squares. The same Caliph whose troops made pregnant Armenian women walk until they dropped dead. The same regime that forcibly converted women and sold them off to the highest Muslim bidder as slaves.

And yet, our textbooks praise the Khilafat Movement. No mention of the Armenian dead.
Not one word of this genocidal truth.

But why blame just that?

We don’t even talk about the countless genocides committed on Indian soil by Islamic invaders. We hush up the massacres of Hindus under Khilji, Aurangzeb, Tipu Sultan. Partition Genocide, Kashmiri Hindu Genocide..

We’re trained to forget. Because that’s what Indian version of ‘secularism’ demands— a collective, selective and convenient amnesia towards the violence committed against Hindus.

But the Armenians haven’t forgotten.

Every year, on April 24th, Armenian communities across the world gather to remember.

Not just to mourn.

But to remind.

To keep alive the memory of the first state-sponsored religious genocide of the 20th century.

And Turkey?

Today, under Erdoğan, Turkey is drifting back into radical Islamist waters. Gone are the days of Atatürk’s secular dream. Today, Turkey supplies drones to Pakistan, shelters terrorists, and yet rolls out the red carpet for Indian Instagram influencers.

Yes, please—go ahead.

Sell your soul and go to Turkey for “content creation.”Pose in pretty dresses against palaces that once housed butchers. Sip your Turkish coffee on a land drenched in the blood of 1.5 million Armenians.

But know this—That same land is also soaked in the blood of 26 innocent Hindu pilgrims killed in Pahalgam, just for being Hindu.

This is not just history.

It is a mirror.

And what you see in it is not always comfortable.

One may say why bring all this up. Why? Because these very same things happen with regularity, by those of that book, and continues to this day in Bangladesh, West Bengal and of course Kashmir…

Unless the saner elements who follow that book repudiate these jihadis and jihadi actions vociferously then, there will again be blood.. and retribution too.