Politisation of the Nobel Prize

Back
New Delhi India, The Hindu - 2nd January 2012

I was under the impression that it was perhaps due to oversight that Mahatma Gandhi was not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, so I was shocked to read in the International Herald Tribune that the Nobel selection committee denied the Peace Prize to the apostle of non-violence not once but five times ― the last in 1948, days before his assassination.  The excuse that the Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously is unacceptable, considering that two Swedish nationals, Erik Axel Karlfeldt (Literature, 1931) and Dag Hammarskjold (Peace, 1961), and a Canadian, Ralph M. Steinman (Medicine, 2011), were awarded posthumously. Alfred B. Nobel's laudable initiative would have helped erase the stigma that he was a manufacturer and dealer in arms, had the Nobel committee not politicised the prize. Eyebrows were raised when U.S. President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize at a time when the U.S. was escalating the war in Afghanistan. How brash the politics can get was shamelessly demonstrated when the Dalai Lama won the Peace Prize in 1989, and the chairman of the Nobel committee said that it was “in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi” - he might as well have added how blatantly the West was using the laureate as a pawn against China. (A UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, Madanjeet Singh is the founder of South Asia Foundation.)

Madanjeet Singh