By Bernama,
Dhaka : Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 forced the Nobel Prize Committee, who had “unanimously” decided to confer him with the top honour after short-listing the Indian leader for the five times, to abandon the plan.
“(Mahatma) Gandhi was short-listed for the Nobel Prize five times,” Press Trust of India (PTI) quoted Norwegian Nobel Committee chief Ole Danbolt Mjos as saying to a local daily.
“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,” he told The Daily Star here.
But, Mjos said, as events were to turn out Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 upsetting the Nobel Committee plan at the last moment.
Nobody was conferred with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948, the website of the Committee shows.
The Nobel Committee chief was asked why Gandhi, the man from whom Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela learnt about non-violence, never deemed qualified to be a Nobel laureate.
Asked could he not have been honoured posthumously in the way former UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjoeld was in 1961, Mjos did not give a clear answer, the report said.
But, he added that the posthumous honour for Hammarskjoeld was “a one-time affair and is not likely to be repeated.”