  Gandhi on Juhu Beach, Mumbai, May 1944. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
BY J V RAVICHANDRAN
IDN-InDepth NewsAnalysis
(IDN) About the epic novel War and Peace, it is said that Leo Tolstoy had adopted a unique style of recounting history -- by drawing a thin line between fact and fiction “...in order to get closer to the truth”.
About the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, the line between honouring aspirations and achievements is more than blurred! Of course, it is well-known that the recipient himself has commented on the contentious selection of his name for the award but the bottom line remains: the size of the line between political proclamations, stature and real achievements!
Moreover, there has been nothing altruistic in President Barack Obama's recent decisions or policies to deserve such a hasty and elevated place in history; almost all the other honoured in this category have made selfless contributions resulting in positive changes to peace in the world -- Martin King, Mother Teresa, Dalai Lama...
It is not as if this is the first instance of ambiguity in the Nobel Prize Committee’s selection of recipients for one of the more coveted and popular awards of the world. In the past, there have been lots of recipients that have been unexplained in the context of merit and relevance but the most noteworthy has been that of Mahatma Gandhi’s!
INCONSISTENCIES
A recent article by the Editor of Open, Sandeepan Deb, has noted similar inconsistencies in ‘My Nobel Nominees’. An extract: “The Nobel Prize for Literature has always been a rather strange award, its selection criteria often incomprehensible, many of its awardees long forgotten. Consider the first three Prizes ever: Sully Prudhomme in 1901, Theodor Mommsen in 1902, and Bjornstjerne Bjornson in 1903. Who were these people? …In 2008, the Prize (for Literature) went to Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio of France, and even the Alliance Francaise library in Delhi did not have a single copy of any book of his!”
An omission that has even been noted prominently in Nobel Foundation’s own website: ‘Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate’.
Let me analyze the blurred lines that could be possible reasons of influences behind the two historical nominations -- Mahatma Gandhi's and Barack Obama's – the former was controversial in its absence and the other “controversial”, to quote the recipient himself , in its selection.
Below are some excerpts (text in double quotes) from the site that guides us a long way to understanding the selection pattern of the Nobel Selection committee:
"Mahatma Gandhi was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was murdered in January 1948. The omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was ‘in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi’."
Even if we do attempt to understand the omission as a momentary lapse of reason, the lack of consistency in views expressed by the committee, when reviewing Gandhiji's nominations then, points to some other reason or rather, lack of it!
Professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on Gandhi (reviewing the first nomination), has cited strange "inconsistencies" as reasons behind why he did not recommend the great and emerging peace maker of the world for the award.
According to the website, Professor Worm-Müller expressed his own doubts as to whether Gandhi's ideals were meant to be universal or primarily Indian: "One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse."
Hello!?!
Did Martin Luther King preach/fight for the Jews? Did the Dalai Lama fight for the Chinese?!?
The last semblance of authenticity associated with the Nobel Prize starts giving way here and the importance of the most coveted and renowned of all awards in the world, begins to fade away into the subjective depth of a few individuals of the selection committee.
Here another telling remark on the website: "These questions (about Mahatma Gandhi’s omission) have been asked frequently: Was the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee too narrow? Were the committee members unable to appreciate the struggle for freedom among non-European peoples? Or were the Norwegian committee members perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be detrimental to the relationship between their own country and Great Britain?"
Add to the above, is the untimely recognition of a politician, who had just announced sending of 20,000 troops to an already war strife land!
And the most relevant part is the text below (an excerpt from The Times on the eve of India's Independence) from Nobelprize.org. It is so illuminating as to merit a full quote:
"Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimize it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. No one wanted war, but he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice. If all Hindus were annihilated for a just cause he would not mind. If there was war, the Hindus in Pakistan could not be fifth columnists. If their loyalty lay not with Pakistan they should leave it. Similarly Muslims whose loyalty was with Pakistan should not stay in the Indian Union."
Here an excerpt from Barack Obama's speech in Oslo:
"I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms."
The only discernable difference in the Times report on Mahatma Gandhi and the U.S. President's speech is the usage of the word "evil", which is understandable because Obama has always had cause to toggle between "evil" and "good" chiefly because his followers and listeners have become tuned to the fact that politically correct statements are the need of the hour and terror organizations have to be labelled as evil to gather political mileage, back home, to justify harsh steps!
If one, who proclaimed war as a necessity at times and therefore, was ignored for the peace award, then the latter, too, by the same yardstick should have been judged on similar grounds.
So, has the recognition of merit so blurred as to institute biased, acknowledgement of contributions of individuals with respect to the state of affairs of the awarding country or according to the status of the individual? (IDN-InDepthNews/23.12.09)
Copyright © 2009 IDN-InDepthNews | Analysis That Matters
-----
*J. V. Ravichandran is a software developer and trainer in information technologies. Writing on global issues is his passion, and sports, theatre, video photography and music are his hobbies. He has contributed several articles to IDN sister publication, The South Asian Outlook (www.southasianoutlook.com). He can be contacted at jvravichandran@yahoo.com
External links:
‘My Nobel Nominees’
http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/voices/my-nobel-nominees
‘Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate’
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/index.html
|
