Why was Gandhiji not awarded Nobel

There are few things which are so obvious that no expertise is required to comment about them. One such thing which intrigued me in recent times is - few names in Nobel Prize list. I wondered, if these gentlemen were awarded then why not Bapu? Few facts which to some extent answer this question are listed here.

Gandhiji was nominated five times (1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and a few days before he was martyred in 1948), shortlisted thrice (1947, 1948) but each time the selection committees had different reasons to not confer the honor. Was the Norwegian committee perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be detrimental to the relationship between their own country and Great Britain?

When Gandhiji was first nominated in 1937, the selection committee's adviser Prof Jacob Worm-Muller was critical about him. According to the Nobel Foundation his comments were - ‘He is undoubtedly a good, noble and ascetic person -- a prominent man who is deservedly honored and loved by masses. There are sharp turns in his policies which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly an ordinary politician’. He also maintained that Gandhiji was not ‘consistently pacifist’ and that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror. He was referring to Non-Cooperation movement in 1920-21 when a crowd in Chauri Chaura attacked a police station. Worm-Muller also was of view that Gandhi was too much of an Indian nationalist. ‘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,’ he said in his report to the selection panel.

When Gandhiji was shortlisted in 1948, he was assassinated, which prompted the panel to seriously think whether he can be awarded posthumously but it had its own doubts.  According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, under certain circumstances, the award could be given posthumously. Thus it was possible to give Gandhi the prize. But the reason this time was – He did not belong to any organization. It was also said that posthumous awards should not be given unless the laureate died after the committee's decision has been made. As Gandhi was not awarded the prize, the committee decided to give no award that year on the ground that there was no ‘suitable living candidate’.

In recent years the omission has been publicly regretted by 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’.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india
http://indiatoday.intoday.in