Monday evening was relatively peaceful after the media scrum
over the past weekend. A few hangers-on could be seen waiting outside the L-6
office of the Bachpan Bachao Andolan in Kalkaji, a south Delhi neighbourhood,
while the staff flitted in and out of the hallway, escorting visitors at the
appointed hour to meet with the 60-year-old Nobel Laureate Kailash ‘Satyarthi’
Sharma. Others are turned away because Bhaisahabji, as he is affectionately
called, would not meet anyone without a prior appointment. A man with a bouquet
walks in to felicitate Mr Satyarthi (Hindi for “a seeker of truth”; the name
has stayed with him from the days of his association with Swami Agnivesh, a
social activist, with whom he collaborated on social causes such as bonded
labour, and after his marriage to Sumedha, his wife of 36 years) but he is
politely told to wait his turn. Some journalists who fail to meet him in his
office are asked to try their luck at his 73, Aravali Apartments residence in
Alaknanda before he flies out to Germany on a short visit later that night.
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| Kailash Satyarthi (Photo credit: Ram Kumar S) |
It was on Friday afternoon India time when the Norwegian
Nobel Committee announced Satyarthi’s name as the co-winner of the 2014 Nobel
Peace Prize (along with 17-year-old Malala Yousufzai of Pakistan who lives in
exile with her parents and siblings in Birmingham, UK after surviving a 9
October 2012 attack on her life by extremists in Mingora, Swat Valley's main
town) at a function in Oslo. Everything has been a blur since then for Mr
Satyarthi and his family. As coincidence would have it, the announcement of the
award came a day after the second anniversary of the attack on Malala and two
days after the wedding anniversary of Mr Satyarthi and on the eve of the
International Day of the Girl Child, which is celebrated on 11 October.
Mr Satyarthi’s office has seen a steady stream of visitors
over the weekend. A notice board displays newspaper clippings about his winning
the Nobel Peace Prize and a modest seating area for guests showcases some of
the awards and plaques that have come his way in a 35-year-long career. A black
board hung on a wall proudly proclaims that the Bachpan Bachao Andolan has
rescued 83,525 children till 30 September. Between receiving well-wishers and entertaining
media interviews, the Satyarthis – Mr Kailash Satyarthi, his wife Sumedha, son
Bhuvan Ribhu, daughter-in-law Priyanka Ribhu and daughter Asmita – were
received by Prime Minister Narendra Modi who congratulated him on winning the
award. Mr Satyarthi’s wife and son are equally involved in the activities of
his NGO. The Bachpan Bachao Andolan’s activities are carried out under the
banner of Association of Voluntary Action, which handles funds and whose
financial audit reports are shared on the Bachpan Bachao Andolan’s website.
For the son of a police constable born in Vidisha, Madhya
Pradesh, Mr Satyarthi’s journey through life is nothing short of remarkable. He
quit engineering to plunge headlong into activism, influenced as he was by the
discrimination he saw around him when was of an impressionable age. To his
credit, he did not allow the occasional aspersions cast at him sotto voce to
distract him from his goals. Mr Satyarthi is the first Indian citizen to win
the Nobel Peace Prize (Mother Teresa who won the Peace Nobel in 1979 became a
naturalised Indian citizen in 1948) and only the eighth Indian to win a Nobel
award. “I am thankful to Nobel committee for recognising the plight of millions
of children who are suffering in this modern age. It is a huge honour for me,”
Mr Satyarthi said immediately after the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced his
name to an unsuspecting nation caught in the midst of two Assembly elections
and ceasefire violations by Pakistan at the Line of Control and the international
border in Jammu and Kashmir. The Peace Nobel to the Satyarthi-Malala duo made
as loud a thud as the artillery shells that were fired across the border,
prompting the peoples, the governments and the militaries of the two South
Asian nuclear-armed neighbours to pause, however fleetingly, and reflect on the
burden of a Peace Nobel that had just been thrust upon the warring Indian
sub-continent.
Religion and nationality
What confounded some, at home and abroad, was the Norwegian
Nobel Committee’s 10 October press release announcing the award. A relevant
portion from the text of the press release said, “The Nobel Committee regards
it as an important point for a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani,
to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism.” The
references to religion and nationality (and the re-hyphenation of India with
Pakistan) have been variously described by some Indian commentators as
condescending, patronising, gratuitous and eminently avoidable. Those references
seemed to compound the embarrassment of (and disbelief in) both countries of
not only having to live down the recent border skirmishes but to live up to the
expectations of the international community now that a Peace Nobel has been
jointly awarded to an Indian and a Pakistani national. However, if the
resumption of the ceasefire violations after a hiatus and the Pavlovian
response by their respective bureaucracies is any indicator, India-Pakistan
peace might be premature just as the Peace Nobel for Barack Obama in 2009 was
controversial. The Norwegian Nobel Committee had said the following about Obama
then: “The Committee has attached special importance to Obama's vision of and
work for a world without nuclear weapons[.] Obama has as President created a new
climate in international politics[.] Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as
instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts.”
Obama not only failed to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility as
promised but the US sees itself returning to Iraq only three years after it
pulled out its troops from there. Also, the situation in West Asia (be it the
Israel-Palestine issue or Syria) and North Africa (which is still to recover
from the after-effects of the Arab Spring) does not inspire much confidence
either.
Yet, there are constituencies in both India and Pakistan
that are keen to see a normalisation of relations through dialogue but, as with
all things subcontinental, patience will be of the essence. As Norwegian Nobel
Institute’s Director Geir Lundestad said, he was more hopeful about the Peace
Nobel helping to further reduce child labour than the likelihood of it leading
to a rapprochement or a detente between India and Pakistan. What he left unsaid
though was that peace would be a bonus and a welcome consequence of the Peace
Nobel – especially if the afterglow of the Peace Nobel were to have a salutary
effect on the prime ministers of India and Pakistan when they meet in Kathmandu
for the SAARC Summit next month. In her statement to media, Malala – at 17, the
youngest person ever to win a Nobel Prize – took the initiative of inviting
both Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan and Prime Minister Narendra Modi
of India to grace the 10 December award ceremony at Oslo. For her part, Malala
described the award as “a message of love between two religions”. She thanked
her father for “not clipping her wings” and said she was proud to have shown
that “a girl is not supposed to be a slave”. She dedicated her award to “all
those children who are voiceless”, saying that “my message to children around
the world is: Stand up for your rights.”
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| Malala Yousafzai |
Struggle for rights
At the same time, there are those who insist on treating the
Peace Nobel for what it is: A recognition of the Satyarthi-Malala duo’s
struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right
of all children to education. As the Nobel Committee said in the press release,
“Children must go to school and not be financially exploited. In the poor countries of the world, 60% of
the present population is under 25 years of age. It is a prerequisite for peaceful global
development that the rights of children and young people be respected.” The
efforts made by NGOs and individuals around the world are paying dividends,
too. As the Committee noted, “It has been calculated that there are 168 million
child labourers around the world today. In 2000 the figure was 78 million
higher. The world has come closer to the goal of eliminating child labour.” A
former Indian diplomat echoed similar sentiments when he said that too much
should not be read either into the timing of the Peace Nobel being awarded to
the Satyarthi-Malala duo or to the situation at the India-Pakistan border. The
award was not meant as an intervention in the recent border skirmishes or an
attempt to play the peacemaker.
Mr Satyarthi’s name, as indeed that of some of his
compatriots, has been doing the rounds of the Nobel nominations for some time
now. Some Americans such as Tom Harkin, a lawmaker from the state of Iowa, and
University of Iowa law professor Lea VanderVelde and some European lawmakers
are known to have re-nominated him since 2005. (When Mr Satyarthi began
receiving death threats, he moved to the US at the invitation of Harkin. His
daughter joined him in Iowa where she was enrolled as a student.) However, one
will have to wait till 2064 or wait for a member of the Norwegian Nobel
Committee to break his/her vow of silence, whichever comes earlier, in order to
say with any degree of certainty as to how and why Mr Satyarthi was awarded the
Peace Nobel. According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, “Proposals
received for the award of a prize, and investigations and opinions concerning
the award of a prize, may not be divulged. A prize-awarding body may, however,
after due consideration in each individual case, permit access to material
which formed the basis for the evaluation and decision concerning a prize, for
purposes of research in intellectual history. Such permission may not, however,
be granted until at least 50 years have elapsed after the date on which the
decision in question was made.” According to Norwegian Nobel Institute’s
Director Geir Lundestad, Mr Satyarthi’s name was among a dozen-odd names of
Indians who were nominated for this year’s Peace Nobel. The number of Indians
being nominated for the award is increasing year on year, too.
Shot in the arm for NGOs
The Peace Nobel to Mr Satyarthi and by extension his NGO,
the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, would have come as a shot in the arm for the NGO
movement in India today. An Intelligence Bureau (IB) report, the contents of
which were published by the media in June, had targeted certain foreign-funded
NGOs and Indian NGOs supported by foreign NGOs for fuelling protests with a
view to obstructing developmental projects. It claimed that the pursuit of such
an agenda had a negative effect on the GDP growth. Following the media reports,
some members of the civil society had voiced their anxieties and concerns at
the attempts to discredit the NGOs. Mathew Cherian, CEO of HelpAge India, says
that governments, past and present, would do well to change their viewpoint on
activism and rethink their attitude towards civil society in general and the
NGOs in particular. “Both the UPA and the NDA always viewed civil society with
suspicion, especially those who receive funds from foreign sources,” says
Cherian. He feels that the NGOs and genuine people’s movements must not be
unfairly criticised or made a scapegoat for the failings of the governments, be
it labour issues, women’s rights or acquisition of land. According to data
collated by the Bachpan Bachao Andolan, there are an estimated 168 million
children globally who are engaged in child labour. India accounts for five
million child labourers as per government data and 50 million, as per NGO
estimates. India needs to pass the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation)
Amendment Bill pending before the Rajya Sabha and ratify the ILO (International
Labour Organisation, a United Nations agency) Convention Number 182 on worst
forms of child labour and Convention Number 138 on the minimum age of
employment.
A double-edged sword
Another reason for the disquiet in diplomatic circles is the
possibility of the Peace Nobel being used as a disruptive tool of intervention
or being motivated by geopolitical considerations. If it was a Chinese
dissident Liu Xiaobo in 2010, it could be a similar figure from the developing
world, India included, in the future. (Irom Sharmila and her relentless
campaign for the repeal of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, or AFSPA, is
a case in point.) This writer was witness to the developments in India and certain
other world capitals leading up to the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo
when China warned countries of “consequences" if their diplomats attended
the ceremony. The Norwegian Nobel Institute had invited 58 ambassadors based in
Oslo of which China, Russia, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Cuba, Indonesia,
Vietnam and the Philippines, among others, excused themselves from the
ceremony. (Russia and Indonesia ensured that their envoys were not in Norway at
the time.) India joined at least 36
other countries, including the US, the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands
in participating in the event. As diplomatic sources then pointed it out to
this writer, New Delhi recognises that the Nobel prizes are a political issue;
they are in a sense like the Miss World contests that are accused of being
driven by market considerations. The dissonance was clearly brought out in the
international discourse that followed the announcement of the Peace Nobel to
Liu Xiaobo, too. As Kishore Mahbubani, Dean and Professor in the Practice of
Public Policy of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National
University of Singapore, then argued, “[The] West has double-standards when it
comes to judging human-rights violations. It does not condemn American society
because it violated every canon of human rights by being the first modern
Western society to reintroduce torture. Instead, it sees Guantanamo as a
blemish that should not take away from all the good that American society has
done.” This inability of the West to understand that there may be an
alternative point of view could well create a major problem for the world, Mr
Mahbubani said, responding to Norwegian Nobel Committee Chairman Thorbjorn
Jagland’s argument that silence undercuts the most basic tenets of human rights
and that supporting a Chinese dissident could not worsen conditions for the
opposition in China. Already, doubts are being raised about whether the Peace
Nobel for Malala would increase hostility in Pakistan towards her and
everything she has come to represent. Some of the commentary published by a
section of the Pakistani media and the opinions voiced by Pakistanis on social
media indicate a deep suspicion of the Nobel awards, with some calling it
motivated or a conspiracy by the West.
All of which begs the question: How noble is the Nobel Peace
Prize?
* * * * * *
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| The Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo, Norway, showcases the ideals that the award stands for. Photo: AFP |
Facts about the Nobel Peace Prize
Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer who invented
dynamite, is the founder of the Nobel Prizes. His fortune was used posthumously
to institute the annual awards.
The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo, Norway. (The Nobel
Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Economic
Sciences are awarded in Stockholm, Sweden. The Royal Swedish Academy of
Sciences awards the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry and Economic Sciences;
the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet awards the Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine, while the Swedish Academy grants the Nobel Prize in
Literature.)
On 10 December, in Oslo, the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates
receive their awards from the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee in the
presence of King Harald V of Norway. (The Nobel Laureates in Physics,
Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Economic Sciences take
centrestage in Stockholm, Sweden, when they receive the Nobel Medal, Nobel
Diploma and a document confirming the Nobel Prize amount from King Carl XVI
Gustaf of Sweden.)
An important part is the presentation of the Nobel Lectures
by the Nobel Laureates. In Oslo, the Nobel Laureates deliver their lectures
during the Nobel Peace Prize Award Ceremony. (In Stockholm, the lectures are
presented days before the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony.)
Nomination process
Each year, the Norwegian Nobel Committee receives more than
250 valid nominations suggesting candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. The
Nobel committee reviews all nominations before creating a shortlist consisting
of 20 to 30 candidates. This list provides the basis for further investigations
and candidate analyses submitted by the committee’s permanent consultants and
other local or international experts. As a rule, the committee reaches its
conclusion at the very last meeting before the announcement of the prize at the
beginning of October. The committee seeks to achieve unanimity in its selection
of the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate. On the rare occasions when this proves
impossible, the selection is decided by a simple majority vote.
Criteria for nominators
A person who falls within one of the following categories
can nominate:
• Members of national assemblies and governments of states;
• Members of international courts;
• University rectors; professors of social sciences,
history, philosophy, law and theology; directors of peace research institutes
and foreign policy institutes;
• Persons who have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize;
• Board members of organisations that have been awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize;
• Active and former members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee
(proposals by members of the committee to be submitted no later than at the
first meeting of the committee after 1 February); or
• Former advisers to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Deadline for nominations
The Nobel committee makes its selection on the basis of
nominations received or postmarked no later than 1 February of the year in
question.
Nominations that do not meet the deadline are normally
included in the following year’s assessment.
Selection process
At the first meeting of the Nobel committee after the 1
February deadline for nominations, the committee’s permanent secretary presents
the list of the year’s candidates. The committee may on that occasion add
further names to the list, after which the nomination process is closed and
discussion of the particular candidates begins. In the light of this first
review, the committee draws up the so-called shortlist — i.e., the list of
candidates selected for more thorough consideration. The shortlist typically
contains 20 to 30 candidates.
The candidates on the shortlist are then considered by the
Nobel Institute’s permanent advisers. In addition to the institute’s director
and research director, the body of advisers generally consists of a small group
of Norwegian university professors with broad expertise in subject areas with a
bearing on the Peace Prize. The advisers usually have a couple of months in
which to draw up their reports. Reports are also occasionally requested from
other Norwegian and foreign experts. When the advisers’ reports have been
presented, the Nobel committee embarks on a thoroughgoing discussion of the
most likely candidates. In the process, the need often arises to obtain
additional information and updates about candidates from additional experts,
often foreign. As a rule, the committee reaches a decision only at its very
last meeting before the announcement of the prize at the beginning of October.
50-year secrecy rule
The committee does not itself announce the names of
nominees, neither to the media nor to the candidates themselves. In certain
cases, names of candidates appear in the media because of sheer speculation or
information released by the person or persons behind the nomination. Access to
information about a given year’s candidates and/ or nominators is not given
until 50 years have passed.
Nominations for the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize
There were 278 candidates, including 47 organisations, for
the Nobel Peace Prize for 2014 — the highest number of candidates ever. The
previous record was 259 from 2013.
Nobel Committee
According to Alfred Nobel’s will, the prize to champions of
peace is to be awarded by a committee “of five persons, to be elected by the
Norwegian Storting (Parliament)”. The rules subsequently adopted by the
Storting for this election state that the members of the committee are elected
for terms of six years, and can be re-elected. The committee chooses its own
chairman and deputy chairman. The director of the Nobel Institute serves as the
committee’s secretary.
Source: www.nobelprize.org
