Between Indifference and Denialism: Post-Colonial South Asia and the Armenian Genocide

In one of the momentous manifestations of Cold War activism, 1967 saw the constitution of the Russell Tribunal, spearheaded by the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. The tribunal condemned the “American crimes in Vietnam in the name of genocide”. For this paper, the tribunal is important not for what it said but for the omission. It eliminated Armenians from the history of genocides to “satisfy the Turkish judge” who in turn was sustained by the Pakistani judge “in the name of Islam”.
Around the same time, in 1971, the government of India published a collection of reminiscences of participants in the Khilafat and the non-cooperation movements. The Khilafat movement is a pivotal event in the history of South Asia and by extension the Middle East. It sought to rescue and resuscitate the Turkish Caliphate. Deeply invested in the movement, influential Muslims supported by Hindu leadership saw their identity entangled with the fate of the Ottoman Empire. Figures such as Gandhi unequivocally supported the movement. Apart from the studied silence on the genocide of the Armenians, the volume is marked by a single reference to Armenians. It cast the massacres as speculative, given to conjecture.
On the face of it, the Pakistani judge’s support for the Turkish counterpart under the banner of Islam and the Indian government’s publication of a volume on reminiscences from 1921 might strike as disparate events. But this reveals a lacuna that is critically understudied in the scholarship on Armenian genocide- denialism and justification of the massacres central to the Khilafat movement which has been a pivotal moment for South Asia state building projects.
As the crucible of the British Empire, concerns about the Khilafat and non-cooperation movements snowballing into larger unrest across India animated the British negotiators at the Lausanne conference leading to deleterious consequences for the Armenians.
Since independence in 1947, South Asian responses towards the genocide have varied from nonchalance to active denial. While India has no clear policy, Pakistan has refused to even recognize Armenia. These two positions have been aided and encouraged by Turkish overtures in the past few decades through academia, diplomacy, and popular culture. They range from producing scholarship on “connected histories” that bind South Asia and Turkey, conveniently occluding any reference to the Armenian genocide, to historical tv series.
Hitherto unexplored, using a range of sources this paper seeks to interrogate the South Asian responses to the Armenian genocide in the last century and answer larger questions. How was denial mounted and is still central to the institutional and statist worldviews? How do we theorize a potent non-perpetrator postcolonial denialism emanating from the “global south”? What role did religion play in denialism? Finally, what holds for the future of recognition and commemoration of the Armenian genocide. While Pakistan is firmly enmeshed in the Turkish geopolitical axis, there arises a realistic and forthcoming possibility of India’s recognition due to structural factors and renewed exploration of ties with Armenia.