PRIZE THAT CRASHED

An ambassador to Norway almost swung the Nobel Peace Prize for Mahatma Gandhi in 1961

- RAMU DAMODARAN

Arthur Conan Doyle may well have described it as the curious incident of the prize that was not awarded. Seventy-five years after the Mahatma’s martyrdom, questions and a degree of puzzlement remain about why he never received the Nobel Prize for Peace in spite of the fact, as the later “opening” of the award archives indicated, he was nominated for it five times: in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and in January 1948 itself, when his assassination occurred two days before the deadline for nominations that year.

As it turned out, there was no prize awarded in 1948 because the Nobel committee concluded there was “no suitable living candidate”. The phrasing appears to have been carefully chosen to suggest there would have been a unanimous awardee were he alive.

And there, matters may have rested, were it not for two particular conversations 12 years later and a number in the 10 months that immediately followed. Central to these was Vallilath Madhathil Madhavan Nair, ‘VMM’ to his seniors and subordinates in the Indian Civil, Indian Political and eventually Indian Foreign Service.

At the time this narrative begins, he was concluding his term as India’s ambassador to Cambodia on transfer to the embassy in Norway. VMM had been sent to Phnom Penh by Jawaharlal Nehru as an elder but unobtrusive counsel to Prince Norodom Sihanouk, whose global policies were often mercurial but who retained great respect and affection for India and its prime minister. The prince invited VMM and Mrs Nair to spend a few days with him and his wife Monique at the royal retreat in Siam Reap before they left Cambodia.