World | India
Gandhi was on Nobel list 5 times
India's Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi was short-listed for the Nobel Prize five times and the last time, in 1947, the selectors had "unanimously" decided to confer him with the honour, visiting Norwegian Nobel Committee chief said.
- By Anisur Rahman, Correspondent
- Published: 00:03 July 23, 2008
Dhaka: India's Father of the Nation Mahatma Gandhi was short-listed for the Nobel Prize five times and the last time, in 1947, the selectors had "unanimously" decided to confer him with the honour, visiting Norwegian Nobel Committee chief said.
When asked by The Daily Star why Gandhi - the man from whom Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela learnt about non-violence - had never received the award, Ole Danbolt Mjos said: "Gandhi was short-listed for the Nobel Peace Prize five times."
"For the first four, majority opinion made sure he did not come by the prize. But then, at the end of 1947, the Nobel Committee finally reached a unanimous decision that, come 1948, the Indian nationalist leader would be the recipient of the prize."
Posthumous problem
But, Mjos said, as events were to turn out Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948.
Asked if he could not have been honoured posthumously in the way former UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjoeld was in 1961, Mjos did not have an unequivocal response.
But he said that the posthumous honour for Hammarskjoeld was "a one-time affair and is not likely to be repeated".
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