Mahatma’s murder denied him Nobel

DHAKA: Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination in 1948 forced the Nobel Prize committee, which had “unanimously” decided to confer him with the top honour after short-listing him five times, to abandon the plan.

“(Mahatma) Gandhi was short-listed for the Prize five times,” Norwegian Nobel committee chief Ole Danbolt Mjos has revealed. “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 a Bangladeshi newspaper here.

But as events were to turn out, Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 upsetting the Nobel committee’s plan at the last moment. Nobody was conferred with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948, as the website of the committee shows.