The Nobel Peace prize of 1948

MKG was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize – 5 times - 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and 1948. I am sure a lot of us wonder why he never won. Or maybe he did ….. The article “Mahatma Gandhi, the Missing Laureate” by Øyvind Tønnesson, Peace Editor at Nobel Prize from 1998-2000 provides some insight.



A except from the article

Why Was Gandhi Never Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize?
Up to 1960, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded almost exclusively to Europeans and Americans. In retrospect, the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee may seem too narrow. Gandhi was very different from earlier Laureates. He was no real politician or proponent of international law, not primarily a humanitarian relief worker and not an organiser of international peace congresses. He would have belonged to a new breed of Laureates.

There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi. Thus it seems that the hypothesis that the Committee's omission of Gandhi was due to its members' not wanting to provoke British authorities, may be rejected.

In 1947 the conflict between India and Pakistan and Gandhi's prayer-meeting statement, which made people wonder whether he was about to abandon his consistent pacifism, seem to have been the primary reasons why he was not selected by the committee's majority. Unlike the situation today, there was no tradition for the Norwegian Nobel Committee to try to use the Peace Prize as a stimulus for peaceful settlement of regional conflicts.

During the last months of his life, Gandhi worked hard to end the violence between Hindus and Muslims which followed the partition of India. We know little about the Norwegian Nobel Committee's discussions on Gandhi's candidature in 1948 – other than the above quoted entry of November 18 in Gunnar Jahn's diary – but it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award. When the committee, for formal reasons, ended up not making such an award, they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi's place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open.

1 December 1999

The full article is available at :

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/

NINE HOURS TO RAMA

An email has been going around claiming this photo captured the assassination of the Mahatma, it’s actually a still from the movie - NINE HOURS TO RAMA - released in 1963.In 1964 it was nominated for a BAFTA Film Award Best British Cinematography.




Horst Buchholz played Nathuram Godse.


"Nine hours to Rama" depicts the life of Nathuram Godse the assassin of Mahatma Gandhi. How Godse planned the assassination is shown in the film. How he became a Hindu activist who blamed Gandhi for the killings of thousands of Hindus by Muslims is revealed in a series of flashbacks

Director:Mark Robson
Writers:Nelson Gidding (writer)
Stanley Wolpert (book)

Release Date:
USA 3 April 1963 (New York City, New York)
West Germany 30 April 1963
Sweden 27 May 1963
France 7 June 1963
Denmark 4 September 1963
Finland 25 October 1963

The film was apparently banned in India; this is not confirmed and needs to be verified.

The moment of assassination from the film can be viewed in the clip below

Perseverance of Mahatma Gandhi

In 1947 Mahatma Gandhi carried a nation of 300 million people - India to independence; this video is an attempt to provide perspective to the effort and achievement of this simple man that we made the Mahatma.