Why Mahatma Gandhi, “An Apostle of Peace”, was never awarded Nobel Peace Prize?

Why Mahatma Gandhi, “An Apostle of Peace”, was never awarded Nobel Peace Prize?

Nobel Peace Prize chronicler T. Gray, in his book “Champions of Peace: The Story of Alfred Nobel, the Peace Prize and the Laureates”, suggests a "curious omission" when men like Martin Luther King Jr. (the 1964 laureate who acknowledged Gandhi as his mentor) and 1960 Nobel Prize winner Albert Luthuli (who applied Gandhi's principles in South Africa) are duly honoured but Gandhi, "the first to employ nonviolence in a political context, was never awarded the Peace Prize". He adds that "A great many people have wondered, over the years, why Gandhi was never chosen for a Nobel Peace Prize."

There has been much speculation as to the reasons for Gandhi not receiving a Nobel Peace Prize, most of it, unfortunately, without any basis in fact. E. Easwaran, in his book “ Gandhi: Mohandas Karamchand”, maintains that it was mainly because peace has been so poorly understood. The word "peace" is publicly used with such contradictory meanings that acts of war and preparation for war are easily passed on in its name.... Therefore because Gandhi did not publicly stop an Open war between two countries his relevance to the peace process went unnoticed during his lifetime.”

That Gandhi's relevance to the peace process was noticed even during his own lifetime is clearly attested to by the number of books dealing with precisely this connection published before the Mahatma's death. In making his further claim regarding the public stopping of wars, Easwaran had obviously not taken the trouble to look at the list of laureates. Perhaps he wrote his piece on Gandhi when the memory of the Prizes for Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho (1973) and Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin (1978) were still very much to the fore in the public consciousness. It should, however, be borne in mind that during this period many of the other Prizes went to those involved in peace demonstrations, those helping the less privileged, those championing a fairer economic world order, social justice, the cause of prisoners of conscience and refugees, as well as those opposing their own totalitarian governments. Andrei Sakharov (1975), Amnesty International (1977), Mother Teresa (1979), Lech Walesa (1983), Desmond Tutu (1984) and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (1985) could by no stretch of the imagination be thought of as having publicly stopped a war between two countries any more than Gandhi had.

During the 1930s and 1940s, when Gandhi could have been a contender, the Prize winners included pacifist writers (e.g. Sir Norman Angell, 1934, Carl von Ossietzky, 1936, and Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, 1937), the International Office for Refugees (1938), the International Committee of the Red Cross (1944), promoter of the United Nations, Cordell Hull (1945), and Women's International League for Peace and Freedom worker Emily Green Balch and her joint 1946 laureate John Raleigh Mott, who had devoted his life to the Young Men's Christian Association.

Speculation on the reasons for Gandhi’s omission from this list takes on a far more accusatory tone in the writings of

In his small book Mahatma Gandhi: A New Approach, Mauritian Indian writer Bissoondoyal, states that "For all time to come some will want to know why Tolstoy was refused the Nobel Prize and, later, his disciple Gandhi." He continues by informing us that although Gandhi was acclaimed the world over as the greatest man of peace [he] went unnoticed by the Nobel Committee even when a formal proposal was made in 1937. The Swedish Nobel Prize Committee awarded a prize to the greatest man of peace for every year and a man like Winston Churchill who never believed in peaceful methods was awarded a prize. Even one of Gandhiji's disciples of U.S.A., Martin Luther King, was awarded the peace prize although posthumously. But it eluded Gandhiji. It was too much for British Raj to agree to Gandhi being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Bissoondoyal then quotes K.P.Goswamy (without giving any reference) as claiming:

It is not known to many in the country that Gandhi's name was in fact officially proposed for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937 but could not materialise because of the vehement opposition of the British Government. It may be instructive to investigate the above assertions in order. It is quite true that Gandhi was formally nominated for the 1937 Peace Prize. It is however unlikely that Gandhi's nomination "went unnoticed" in the deliberations for that year - after all, it was submitted by a Norwegian parliamentarian, the well known and influential labour leader, Ole Colbjørnsen. The initiative for the nomination appears to have been taken by the Friends of India Society, of which Madame Colbjørnsen was the vice-president. The president of the society, Bokken Lasson, is reported to have claimed in the press that the society "shall not give in until Gandhi receives the Nobel peace prize."

On 30 January 1948, just before the close of nominations for the 1948 Prize, Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. Three months later the Madras English daily The Hindu ran an article headlined "Nobel Prize for Gandhiji: Posthumous Award Likely". The story continued:

“...Dr. Samar Sen of the Dacca University, who was on a lecture tour of Norway last year and who has recently returned to India, told the United Press of India today that there was general regret in Europe that the Nobel Prize for Peace was not awarded to Mahatma Gandhi during his life-time though he was the greatest apostle of peace. Dr. Sen further said serious attempts were now being made to make a posthumous award of the Peace Prize to Gandhiji.

There is no precedent for such a posthumous award of the Nobel Prize and certain formalities have to be complied with. According to Dr. Sen, the Prize was about to be given to Gandhiji last year; but it was decided at the last moment to postpone the award by one year in view of the Punjab riots and the Indo-Pakistan quarrels. Dr. Sen. added that there were two outstanding instances where the reluctance of the Nobel Prize authorities to offend certain powerful foreign countries made them postpone the award again and again until it was too late and they were those of Tolstoy and Gandhiji.

Madame E. Greene Balch, a well-known peace-worker and Nobel Laureate now in Norway, is trying to ensure that similar instances would not recur in the future and that formalities were not now allowed to stand in the way of a posthumous award to Gandhiji.

...At the request of certain members of the Prize Committee, Dr. Samar Sen recently contacted Dr. Rajendra Prasad, the Congress President, and Pandit Nehru, India's Prime Minister, and it is understood that certain documents required by the Committee have been sent to the authorities concerned.

The Prize, if awarded to Gandhiji, is likely to go to the Gandhi National Memorial Fund earmarked for the work of promotion of peace.

So it appears that the Mahatma had finally, if indeed not before, become a serious contender.”

The 1960 Peace Prize, awarded in 1961, was a ground breaking one. The peace laureate Albert John Luthuli, formerly President of the African National Congress, had long engaged in a peaceful struggle against apartheid. Abrams makes the important point that "it was noteworthy that the Committee had finally found a laureate outside the limits of western civilization." Perhaps it was this Euro-centrism, the pre-war Norwegian international bias or, the interpretation preferred by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Gandhi's untimely death, more than any British political pressure that defeated the honouring of the Mahatma. As Sverdrup comments:

“I don't know why Gandhi didn't get the Prize - and nobody else does. All members of the Nobel Committee from those years are now dead, and no records are kept on their deliberations. I suppose he would have got the Prize if he hadn't been killed in the beginning of 1948, but that is just my guess."