~ Pradip Phanjoubam ~
The 2014 peace Nobel Prize has been jointly awarded to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzay, an Indian and a Pakistani, both for their commendable work towards ending child labour. At only 17 when she was announced the winner of this coveted but now increasingly controversial prize, Malala has set another record for being the youngest ever to receive the award. She is a courageous campaigner for education of the girl child, and for her work which offended the Taliban, she was shot and left for dead, but was eventually flown to England for emergency treatment and successfully rescued. Since then, she has in defiance of all Taliban diktats, been continuing with her good work of advocating education for girls in her beleaguered homeland. Quite without doubt, she deserves the prize and all the goodwill of the world she has earned. Kailash Satyarthi, the man who shared the Peace Nobel, has also been a tireless worker for children education and for an end to the widespread atrocity of child labour in India. The 60 year old man however has drawn some flak for being associated with evangelical missions in his work, but this is immaterial and he should be judged by the quality of his work and dedication to his mission alone. Of this, nobody who has known him and his work, has complained so far.
Deserving as the two winners may be, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has drawn a lot of criticism not so much for any doubt about the credibility of the winners, but for the West biased politics quite evident in the choices. As many knowledgeable observers have pointed out, had Malala been a child victim of the war the West has been waging on the Taliban region of Pakistan and Afghanistan, probably she would have remained ignored by the Western media and therefore out of reckoning for the Nobel Prize. The fact also is, there have been and there continues to be numerous indiscriminate children victims of the continuing Western Drone strikes on these countries. Malala could easily have been one of them. Alternately, these observers also point out that Malala would have equally remained ignored and unknown had she been campaigning not against the Taliban, but against the terror of the West’s Drone strikes on her homeland. They argue that Malala fitted well into the racist narrative which interprets these Western interventions in Afghanistan and Pakistan as the White Knights rescuing the damsels in distress from the hands of the evil and savage war mongers, therefore the sympathy for her. The reality of the destruction caused by the West itself to the lives of thousands of innocent children in these countries is conveniently forgotten. Kailash Satyarthi too has his part in this new “Great Game” as Arundhati Roy calls it. The instability of Pakistan is making the West look for firmer grounds to launch its assaults on its enemies, and India is a candidate on its radar.
Even without reading too much into the new “Great Game” theory and how even the Nobel committee is party to this, what is evident is, only those fighting the enemies of the West can hope to win the Nobel Peace and so too the Literature prizes. Gandhi, although acknowledged internationally as the undisputed messiah of peace, never received it for he was fighting the British. Leo Tolstoy never received the literature prize too though considered by many to be the greatest novelist the world because his native Russia has always been for most part of its history at cold war and sometimes open wars with the West. Dalai Lama and Aung San Suu Kyi received it for they were pitted against the ideological enemies (then) of the West. Quite controversially again, Henry Kissinger who was behind some of the world’s worst and murderous bombings in Vietnam and Cambodia, received the peace prize. This being the case, one of the obvious conclusions for us in Northeast India for instance would be, if this bias were not there, there is every likelihood Irom Chanu Sharmila’s campaign against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA-1958, a draconian law which has been on so many occasions declared as untenable under the International Humanitarian Law, would have been a very likely candidate to win this prize. Sharmila not receiving the prize is just a Northeast centric thought, but we do hope the Peace and Literature Nobel Prizes, undoubtedly the most important and controversial of the five (six including later addition economic sciences, the other three being Chemistry, Physics and Medicine) are able to recue themselves from this sinking lack of credibility.
The writer is the Editor of Imphal Free Press.
