Is Britain's Aid Funding a Political Crackdown in Bangladesh?

What a few weeks it has been for that Machiavellian matriarch Sheikh Hasina. She swished into London in August to bookmark the Olympic Games (opening and closing ceremony tickets for Bangladesh's premier - no messing around with an either/or scenario).

In between trips to her home in London she found time to meet her key diplomatic allies and financial backers: prime minister David Cameron, foreign secretary William Hague, opposition leader Ed Miliband, and the now former international development secretary, Andrew Mitchell. Never one to shy away from the limelight, Hasina was even afforded the privilege and prestige of a reception at Downing Street.

But while canapés were nibbled in London SW1A, back in Dhaka, Hasina's henchmen were busy disassembling the country's fragile democratic apparatus in the most sustained assault on freedom of speech in the 41 years since independence.

Last month, Bangladesh's supreme leader ordered the arrest of Mir Quasem Ali, a leading member of the Islamist political party Jamaat-e-Islami, who also runs a charitable organisation named after the great Arab polymath Ibn Sina.

Ali's lesser crime is less his political and philosophical ideology, and more the 15 million people he reaches via newspapers like Naya Diganta, part of a Jamaat-owned media group. His greater crime though, it would appear, is his very public criticism of a war crimes tribunal set up by Hasina after her Awami League party rose to power in 2008.

This tribunal, which veers between medieval show trial and outright witch-hunt - and includes inventing witness statements, coaching witnesses, and interfering with judicial appointments - has been denounced by everyone from the United Nations to the United States Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues Stephen J. Rapp.

Hasina's men love the tribunal, which aims to bring to trial anyone involved in the ghastly events surrounding the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, where it is alleged that three million people were killed, and up to 400,000 women were raped. The cause is worthy but, say critics, its underlying motives are purely political. All those so far arrested are opponents of Hasina, many from Jamaat-e-Islami. Happily for Bangladesh's premier, none of those on (show-) trial are from her side of the political fence.

Ali's arrest is merely the latest of a string of concerted attacks on Hasina's opponents, including the intimidation of journalists and a sustained and unpalatable assault on Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, in an attempt to undermine and nationalise his trailblazing microfinance lender Grameen Bank.

It's strangely sad that this medieval madness is taking place just 5,000 miles away from an Olympic village whose athletes and overseers trumpet the causes of freedom, inclusivity and progress. And its ironic in the extreme that Britain's political leaders should be condoning and even championing a woman bent on denying those very human rights to her people.

But still the bullying continues on the subcontinent. Earlier this month, almost the entire elected membership of the opposition Bangladesh National Party bar its leader was arrested. A litany of charges now awaits the main opposition leader, Khaleda Zia, and her family: Zia charges that these accusations are pure retribution on the part of her political nemesis, Sheikh Hasina.

None of this bodes well for elections next year. In her meeting with Ed Miliband, Hasina stated that "all the future elections in Bangladesh will be held in a complete fair and neutral manner". Few believe that any election in Bangladesh can be either 'free' or 'fair' so long as she retains supreme power. Later, in a BBC interview, Hasina proclaimed that her opposition back home enjoyed every possible political and democratic right.

Perhaps she believes this to be true. Perhaps she believes that her opponents are indeed truly guilty of heinous crimes, while her political cronies and cohorts are above the fray, innocent and pure, garlanded with roses and perfume. Yet if this really is the case, it would seem strange that she is denying any of the accused at the war crimes tribunal access to proper legal representation. Last year, Jamaat-e-Islami's British lawyer Toby Cadman, a respected human rights lawyer practicing at London's 9 Bedford Row International, was detained on arrival in Dhaka Airport, despite his international credentials. Cadman was held for ten hours before being expelled from Bangladesh on the next Dubai-bound plane. His request for a visa to return to Bangladesh to defend his clients have been met with a steely silence. Ironically, during the previous Government when Sheikh Hasina was leader of the opposition, and faced trial herself, her defence team was assisted by the presence of Cherie Booth QC, wife of former PM, Tony Blair.

Hasina's assault on freedom is one that the British government has the financial and political resources to stop - right now. Yet both our government and our opposition are doing precisely nothing to halt events in Dhaka, preferring to stick their fingers in their ears and hold their nose.

The now former International development secretary Mitchell refused to comment on the treatment of Yunus at all - until finally putting pen to paper in a letter of reply addressed to Cadman, published in the September 7 edition of the Daily Telegraph. Meanwhile the UK High Commission in Dhaka refused to condemn the arrest of opposition politicians. The Department for International Development (DFID) and the Foreign Office are complicit in this crackdown on democracy and freedom of expression.

The British Government, through DFID, directly funds Bangladesh to the tune of £250 million a year, and has plans to increase this support to £1 billion over the next three years. This makes the UK the chief funder of its former colony, money that is currently handed over, directly to Hasina's cronies, with no strings or conditions attached.

So what is to be done? Firstly, the British Government must make direct-to-government aid to Bangladesh conditional on freedom of expression. In the last ten years the country has been listed last a total of five times in the annual Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index. But when the British Government is providing funds unconditionally to a country with such fundamental deficiencies, then it is incredulous this comes without strings attached.

Secondly, Britain and others must demand that all trials, whether for war crimes or otherwise, are conducted in accordance with universal standards of due process with full respect to the presumption of innocence, before a tribunal that is impartial and independent of the ruling party.

Finally, the British Government has to acknowledge that its funding modus operandi isn't working. In recent weeks, the UK has withheld aid to Rwanda's leader Paul Kagame, whose administration has been linked to alleged human rights abuses, at home and abroad. In Bangladesh, the government's crackdown against human rights and freedoms are not even alleged - they are plain for all to see.

Few but the most virulent hawks would deny that international aid has its benefits, but the British coalition government is taking its liberal stance on foreign aid funding to the absolute extreme. By channeling billions of pounds of unconditional funding into the maw of a truly noxious foreign leader more interested in witchhunts and her world standing than with promoting and protecting human rights or democracy, Britain is starting to look a complicit and even active part of the awful events unfolding on the subcontinent.

We need to change how we fund not just Bangladesh, but many countries. If a country's leaders use UK taxpayers' money to subjugate their own people in the covert name of political retribution, it is time for us to make a change. Surely people of the intelligence of Cameron, Hague and Miliband should be able, at the very least, to understand this very real pilgrim's progress.

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Funders of controversial movie traced by US intelligence

While protests and riots are spreading in a number of Muslim nations following release of a controversial anti-Islam movie named 'Innocence of Muslims', various intelligence agencies in the United States have already traced two of the main masterminds of the project, while US intelligence is scrutinizing various scoops and evidences on involvement of an Lebanese-American woman, who's NGO might also have put significant amount of money in this project with the ulterior motive of pushing Muslims and Jews towards extreme confrontation. Some analysts are even seeing the movie as a conspiracy of the anti-Israel elements inside America. It was also learnt by the US intelligence that most of the actors of the film were kept in dark by its masterminds about the entire script, while many of the actors were recruited from the American underground porn movie world. Tim Dax, who also played role in 'Innocence of Muslims' is learnt to have earlier worked in a number of gay porn films has already expressed severe anger at the makers of the film for "trapping" them by hiding the script of the movie.

Egyptian-American, Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih, the president of the Duarte-based charity Media for Christ, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a convicted felon from Cerritos, emerged as forces behind "Innocence of Muslims." Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih got converted into Christianity from Islam few years back. Another mastermind behind the project is a Lebanese-American female, who runs a multi-million dollar NGO in United States. The same women earlier extended "cooperation" to Florida's infamous Pastor Terry Jones, who created international havoc by setting fire on Quran. The organization of ex-Muslim Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih - Media for Christ, whose stated mission is to "glow Jesus' light" to the world, obtained permits to shoot the movie in August 2011, and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula provided his home as a set and paid the actors, according to government officials and those involved in the production.

Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih founded the charity in 2005 with US$30,000. In its 2011 tax filing, which covers the period of the filming, the charity reported having eight employees and contributions of US$ 1 million. While Media for Christ public filings describe it as an evangelical organization working to spread the Gospel, Nassralla has devoted himself in recent years to criticizing Islam in speeches and interviews.

Following outbreak of massive protests in the Muslim world, both Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih and Nakoula Basseley Nakoula went into hiding and had been denying any "involvement" behind the movie, though, according to porn actor Tim Dex, he had been paid US$ 75 per day through checks drawn on the bank account of Abanob Basseley Nakoula — a name linked to the Cerritos property where Nakoula Basseley Nakoula resides. The home's distinctive front door with triangle windows in a half-circle pattern is visible in the 14-minute trailer for the movie posted on YouTube.

the check he received from his role in the movie was paid from the bank account of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

Refering to Nakoula, Bishop Serapion of the Coptic Orthodox Diocese of Los Angeles said, "He denied completely any involvement."

Similarly, an official at Media for Christ said the charity was not connected to the movie and was upset by its controversial content. The same day, an associate who served as a script consultant told the paper that Joseph Nassralla Abdelmasih "had nothing to do with it."

The Innocence of Muslims - movie that has enraged radical Islamists who have rioted and committed murders in the Middle East this week, was partially shot on a set that Paramount's TV unit helped to build for its TV show JAG, and a man with five decades of movie and television experience. Portions of the infamous, micro-budget movie were filmed in Saugus, about 30 miles north of Hollywood, on a portion of Blue Cloud Film Ranch called "Baghdad Square," which is often used for TV and film productions seeking to replicate Middle Eastern war zones. Other movies and TV shows partially filmed at Blue Cloud include Iron Man, Get Him to the Greek, Serenity, Arrested Development, NCIS Los Angeles, The Closer, Threat Matrix and CSI. The U.S. military has also made training videos at Blue Cloud. Veluzat, 72, said the 100-acre ranch is for sale for US$ 15 million. Although makers of the movie claimed to have invested US$ 5 million in the project, it was later learnt from numerous sources inside American film industry that the entire budget of the film would have been less than US$ 400,000.

The makers of the movie not only hided the script from the actors, but also deceived the American government by giving another name while the shooting was continuing. They registered the name as 'Innocence of Bin Laden' and later 'Desert Warriors', while finally they changed the name to 'Innocence of Muslims'. The film starts with a claim that the Prophet of Islam was "illegitimate" and "his birth a disgrace". 

Later the Prophet of Islam is shown as a low status man ridiculed by a boy for having no known father. Then most of the film deals with the rise of Islam, there is a great deal of violence and cruelty. Some of the allegations made in the film such as the followers of the Prophet took slaves; Non-Muslims were forced to pay a tax or Jizyah, which the film calls as extortion. The movie also shows a donkey becoming first Muslim by establishing faith on the Prophet of Islam.

The s0-called film was produced and directed by a person first identified in casting calls as "Alan Roberts",and then in media reports "Sam Bacile", though finally it had been revealed that Nakoula Basseley Nakoula actually used pseudonym of Sam Bacile and on purpose told reporters in interview that he was a real estate businessman from Israel and was a Jew. Though later it was proved that, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula aka Sam Bacile is neither an Israeli nor Jewish but is a Coptic Christian.

The cast and crew have publicly stated that they were deceived about the purpose and content of the film. In a statement obtained by CNN, the film's 80 cast and crew members disavowed the film, they said: "The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose." It further explained, "We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred." Cindy Lee Garcia, who played the mother of Muhammad's bride-to-be, said the script for a movie called Desert Warriors, about life in Egypt 2,000 years ago and that the character "Muhammad" was referred to as "Master George" on set. According to Garcia, "Bacile" claimed to be an Israeli real estate mogul. Later, however, he told her he was Egyptian and she heard him speaking in Arabic with other men on set. Garcia was stunned to find out that the film was actually an anti-Muslim agitprop piece and that "it makes me sick" that she was involved in a film that caused people to die. She is considering legal action against "Bacile." The overdubbing permitted the film's director to deceive the cast into taking part in the movie under the pretense that it was about the life of a generic Egyptian from 2,000 years ago. Sarah Abdurrahman, a producer for WNYC's On the Media program stated that all of the religious references were overdubbed.

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High profile corruptions by Awami ‘Chors’

Mr. A B M Musa is one of the senior-most journalists in Bangladesh. In a recent gathering he advised everyone to shout "s/he is a thief" as soon as any one connected with the Government is sighted. I am sure that Mr. Musa also knows very well that there are still some honest people in the country working for the Government. Apparently one would say that Mr. Musa should not have made such irresponsible utterances. But when you think more deeply you can understand how frustrated Mr. Musa felt with the present state of affairs. Next day I read something very interesting. Mr. Musa writes about a shipwrecked person in an island full of snakes, crocodiles and other dangerous animals. Then he sees a ship passing-by and waves in desperation. God responded to his call when he found a boat coming from the ship. The man in the boat gave some recent newspapers and said "you should read them and decide if you want to go back Bangladesh or remain in the island".

When a very respected and elderly journalist like Mr. Musa writes and speaks like that, it is time for us to look at things to its fullest context and think if there is a limit to it or will it go on endless. First let us talk about monetary corruption. I would not like to go on details but would just touch upon a few of them. By now there is hardly anyone in Bangladesh who has not heard about the case of Hallmark group. I understand they took well over four thousand crores of taka from the state-owned Sonali Bank and there is little hope that the bank can recover that money. Yet the finance minister calls it just a minor incident. Another company known as "Destiny Group" [a multilevel marketing company] took money not only from banks but also from innocent public in general. Some of those involved have even run away from the country. By market manipulation some people also made quick money out of stock exchange and most of it has gone out of the country. BEXIMCO Group took full advantage of the inflated price of their share to take a huge loan from the bank against shares as security. The price of those shares is now not even 1/10th of the negotiated deal. There is another very interesting case of a mortgaged ship being sold without any reference to the bank. Such things can only happen in Bangladesh. Now let us talk about the most sensational case – Padma Bridge project. Some people were too eager to make quick money and on the assurances of various contracts took in advance a large sum of money. I believe the transactions took place in Canada. When the Canadian Police started investigating the matter, a young Bangladeshi (also Canadian national) couple slipped out of Canada and returned to Bangladesh. The World Bank who initially promised to finance most of the project withdrew from the project. The World Bank [WB] provided the Government some vital information relating to the corruption. The government initially tried to laugh it out by saying how could there be any corruption when contract have not been awarded. Then for a few days the Government kept on blaming Professor Yunus for the WB decision. Then slowly the cats started emerging out of the bag. One minister has already resigned and another adviser is on the verge of resignation. Perhaps the root of the corruption goes beyond that and it cannot be resolved so easily.

Corruption is now deep rooted at every level of the society. A minister's APS was caught with a car full of money in sacks on way to minister's house. The minister resigned. He was still kept in the cabinet as a minister without any portfolio. The Anti-corruption Commission gained full confidence of the government by declaring the minister innocent. The nation soon came to know the identity of two new patriots. They are none other than the ministers who resigned on charges of corruption. If you want to know how wide spread and deep rooted the corruption network is then you have to visit any of the government departments or agencies who are supposed to provide service to the people. Let us start with local police, hospital, port office, customs office, land registry and record office, and then go to relevant offices for gas, electricity, water and to primary school for admission of children. You will soon know that there is only one solution to your problems and that is money. The railway minister admitted his inability to recover railway lands because of the influence of very powerful elements. Similarly the rivers and canals are being filled up by influential people for their use.

We will now take a quick look at the law and order situation. Almost every day one or two dead bodies are recovered from rivers and drains. Police said to have identified the body of garment labour leader Aminul Islam like that. The young journalist couple were murdered in their own bedroom perhaps because they knew too much about government corruption. A BNP leader along with his driver was hijacked from his car never to be seen again. There are others who die in so-called "cross-fire" (extra judicial killing). Countless people die on the roads when a minister advocates for driving licence to be made easier.

But the present Government can be proud of some of its success. It took no time to change the name of the Dhaka Airport to remove the name of Zia from it. It successfully evicted Khaleda Zia from her cantonment house. It hanged most of those responsible for 1975 changes. It brought in the constitutional changes to hold election under the present government instead of a non-party care-taker government. However, their claimed success of dealing with BDR revolt is most debatable. Men in arms revolt is nothing short of sedition. There can be no negotiation or compromise with them. Call for surrender of arms and submit them to lawful authority. Everything else comes after that. The elite forces of the country are maintained to defend the country and they should have been allowed to take necessary action to restore normalcy. The so-called political negotiation with the mutineers resulted into a great loss for the country. One can become a politician overnight but it takes lot of tax-payers' money, years of training, hard work and dedication to become a colonel or brigadier. The nation can never excuse those responsible for the massacre.

We also suffered in the hands of the opposition when they were in power. We do not know where is the end and where shall we go. 

BY :   F R Chowdhury.

Myanmar: The Global War On Islam

The June e thnic and religious violence in the northwest ( Rakhine State, the northwestern coast just south of Bangladesh) caused an uproar in Moslem countries, with calls for retribution against Myanmar for allowing it to happen. Long simmering tensions between the Moslem migrants from Bangladesh and the native Buddhists erupted into widespread fighting two months ago after some Rohingya men were accused of raping a Buddhist woman. Weeks of violence followed. This caused over a thousand casualties, most of them Moslem and thousands of buildings destroyed. This has displaced nearly 100,000 people (about 75 percent Moslem).

The Moslems and Buddhists have never gotten along and there’s always been some tension. Until recently, the military government suppressed any open talk of these tensions. But since the elections last year, there’s been more freedom of the press and that has included more public discussion by Buddhists about how much they dislike the Rohingyas.

Rakhine State has a population of 3.8 million, with about 800,000 of them Moslems, mostly Rohingyas. These are Bengalis, or people from Bengal (now Bangladesh) who began migrating to Burma during the 19th century. At that time the British colonial government ran Bangladesh and Burma, and allowed this movement, even though the Buddhist Burmese opposed it. Britain recognized the problem too late, but the Bengali Moslems were still in Burma when Britain gave up its South Asian colonies after World War II (1939-45).

Bangladesh has refused to take these Moslems back as Bangladeshis, and the Rohingya have come to consider themselves a separate group. Burma never let the Rohingya become citizens, which helped stoke tensions between the Moslems and Buddhists. Bangladesh has long had too many people, and illegal migration to neighboring areas (mainly India) has been a growing problem. In the 1990s, an outbreak of violence led to over a quarter million Rohingya fleeing to Bangladesh. Some 28,000 are in refugee camps in Bangladesh, another 200,000 live outside the camps in Bangladesh and some are in Thailand, where they are considered economic migrants, and thus illegal.

This year Bangladesh changed its refugee policy and refused to accept any more Rohingya, considering the refugee camps an unfair burden caused by Burmese refusal to absorb the Rohingya already in their territory. This has led to Burma creating heavily guarded camps for these displaced Rohingya. Aid workers call these camps prisons, but the Burmese want to limit the movement of Rohingya who now consider themselves at war with Buddhists. But only about ten percent of the Rohingya have been forced from their homes. The rest live in (usually segregated) villages and neighborhoods throughout Rakhine State.

Hindus, Christians or Buddhists in this region have bad memories of Moslems, who have been around for over a thousand years as invaders and violent religious bigots. These memories are sustained by the current wave of Islamic terrorism around the world and within the region. The UN is trying to get Burma to absorb the Rohingya, but the Burmese believe that absorption is not practical and these Moslems must move to a Moslem country (preferably Bangladesh, where they came from.) The Burmese resent the UN interference and have arrested some aid workers who are helping the Rohingya.

The Burmese police and army are accused of doing little to halt the violence, and often taking the side of rioting Buddhist civilians. Because of this, Burma has agreed to investigate the violence and is under international pressure to allow the Rohingya to stay and become citizens. But the Burmese government is under domestic pressure to take a hard line on the Rohingya, who are seen as alien invaders, even though most of them have lived in Burma for generations. This situation is quite common in the region. There are many more, most of them quite recent, illegal Bangladeshi migrants in India, where frequent outbreaks of violence with Indians do not get a lot of international attention because the Indians involved are often Moslems. There is a similar situation in Iran and Pakistan, where millions of unwelcome Afghan refugees (from the 1980s Russian invasion) refuse to leave. China and Thailand have thousands of unwelcome Burmese refugees from the tribal rebellions in rural Burma. China has recently forced many of the refugees back into Burma, while Thailand threatens to do so. In neither of these cases is religion an issue. But when the illegal migrants are Moslem and the people they are displacing are infidels (non-Moslem) the Islamic world considers any resistance to be part of the global “war on Islam.”

At the moment, the Burmese want the Rohingya restricted to guarded camps. The Moslem world calls these camps prisons, but the Burmese public sees allowing the Rohingya to go free as leading to eventual establishment of a separatist Moslem territory in Rakhine State. The Burmese note the eight years of Islamic terror in southern Thailand and the Islamic terrorist problem in India. Most Burmese see themselves as victims of Moslem aggression and invasion, but the Moslem world sees Burma as making war on Moslems. The rest of the world calls for an end to violence and some kind of justice. The problem is that the Burmese Buddhists and the world’s Moslems have a very different concept of justice in this case.

August 23, 2012: The government freed six of the twelve foreign aid workers it had arrested in June and accused of helping to promote the violence.

August 20, 2012: The government has eliminated direct censorship. That is, publications no longer have to submit material to government censors before they print it. But there is still censorship. Various old (from the period of military rule) laws still allow the government to shut down publications believed to be causing trouble. Government officials decide what “trouble” means in each situation. You still need government permission to create a new publication.

August 19, 2012: The government announced the creation of a commission to investigate the recent (June) violence between Buddhists and Moslems ( Rohingya) in the northwest. The commission will attempt to come up with recommendations that will satisfy foreign (mainly Moslem) critics. Moslem nations want to be free to operate aid efforts among the Rohingya without Burmese supervision. The Burmese are reluctant to do this because so many Islamic charities are fronts for Islamic terrorist organizations. Several large Islamic terrorist groups (Taliban, al Qaeda) have already declared war on Burma and called for all other Moslems to join in.

August 18, 2012: In the north (Kachin state) there was a brief gun battle between soldiers and armed members of the ABSDF (All Burma Students’ Democratic Front). There were no injuries. The ABSDF consists of rebel Burmese from the south who have established bases in the Kachin tribal territories and allied themselves with Kachin rebels. This particular clash was apparently an accident, as soldiers guarding a supply convoy to an isolated army base through they might be ambushed.

August 14, 2012: There was another outbreak of ethnic violence in Rakhine State, leaving three dead and over a dozen wounded.

August 5, 2012: There was another outbreak of violence in Rakhine State, where over 300 homes of Rohingya were burned and over 3,000 people forced to flee the Buddhist attacks.

August 2, 2012: Security forces seized 1.4 million amphetamine pills and 116 kilometers (255 pounds) of heroin last month. The drug gangs are becoming more active in the north and most of their production is headed for China. This has led to a join Burma-China police taskforce to go after drug gangs that are operating on both sides of the border. The drug gangs are controlled by tribal rebel groups and the income supports the tribal armies that the government has been fighting for generations. Despite current peace deals, the recent growth of drug production up north indicates that the tribes (or at least some warlords) intend to maintain their private armies.

August 1, 2012: Bangladesh ordered three foreign aid groups to stop work among Rohingya refugees along the Burma border. Bangladesh considers the Rohingya, who were originally from Bangladesh, to be Burmese (because the Rohingya have been in Burma for generations.)

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Nobel Prize for Mujib or Sheikh Hasina (!)

 

Nobel committee is actively considering bestowing Nobel Peace Prize to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for her outstanding contributions in restoring peace thus making an end to decade-old armed conflicts within the Chittagong Hill Tract areas, the Eastern districts in Bangladesh, as the committee is unable conferring the posthumous prize to Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh, for his outstanding leadership, sacrifice, contribution and dedication in liberating the country in 1971. It is learnt from sources that the name of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was proposed by a number of world leaders right after the birth of the nation. Amongst the nominators, India's former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi strongly recommended bestowing Nobel Peace Prize to Mujib, being a "heroic leader" of South Asia, after Mahatma Gandhi, though Nobel Committee never considered Mahatma Gandhi as a candidate for this prestigious prize, which had later drawn harsh criticism in the world. Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948) has become the strongest symbol of non-violence in the 20th century. It is widely held – in retrospect – that the Indian national leader should have been the very man to be selected for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was nominated several times, but was never awarded the prize.

Though nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously under the impression that the prize cannot go to any individual, who is not alive, some of the strong recommenders of the name of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman said, according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously.

They say, Mahatma Gandhi was not given the prize because, according to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee, he "did not belong to an organisation, he left no property behind and no will; who should receive the Prize money", while the case of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is totally different. He is the founder of Bangladesh Awami League and has 'Bangabandhu Foundation', which could receive the Prize money, if he is offered the Nobel Peace Prize.

The supporters of Bangabandhu also strongly suggest the Nobel Peace Prize committee to remove the "curse" of not offering the prize to Mahatma Gandhi but "honouring" another "great hero of the Indian sub-continent".

The admirers of Mujib strongly believe that it is the right time for the Nobel Prize Committee to consider either Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman or his daughter Sheikh Hasina for the Peace Prize, thus showing proper respect to the millions of Bangla speaking populations in Bangladesh, India and the world.

Questioning the reason behind never taking the case of Mohandas Gandhi as the nominee of Nobel Peace Prize, critics ask - was the horizon of the Norwegian Nobel Committee too narrow. Were the committee members unable to appreciate the struggle for freedom among non-European peoples? Or were the Norwegian committee members perhaps afraid to make a prize award which might be detrimental to the relationship between their own country (Norway) and Great Britain?

Gandhi was nominated in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947 and, finally, a few days before he was murdered in January 1948. The omission has been publicly regretted by later members of the Nobel Committee; when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was "in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi". However, the committee has never commented on the speculations as to why Gandhi was not awarded the prize, and until recently the sources which might shed some light on the matter were unavailable.

Among those who strongly admired Gandhi were the members of a network of pro-Gandhi "Friends of India" associations which had been established in Europe and the USA in the early 1930s. The Friends of India represented different lines of thought. The religious among them admired Gandhi for his piety. Others, anti-militarists and political radicals, were sympathetic to his philosophy of non-violence and supported him as an opponent of imperialism.

In 1937 a member of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament), Ole Colbjørnsen (Labour Party), nominated Gandhi for that year's Nobel Peace Prize, and he was duly selected as one of thirteen candidates on the Norwegian Nobel Committee's short list. Colbjørnsen did not himself write the motivation for Gandhi's nomination; it was written by leading women of the Norwegian branch of "Friends of India", and its wording was of course as positive as could be expected.

The committee's adviser, professor Jacob Worm-Müller, who wrote a report on Gandhi, was much more critical. On the one hand, he fully understood the general admiration for Gandhi as a person: "He is, undoubtedly, a good, noble and ascetic person – a prominent man who is deservedly honoured and loved by the masses of India." On the other hand, when considering Gandhi as a political leader, the Norwegian professor's description was less favourable. There are, he wrote, "sharp turns in his policies, which can hardly be satisfactorily explained by his followers. (...) He is a freedom fighter and a dictator, an idealist and a nationalist. He is frequently a Christ, but then, suddenly, an ordinary politician."

Gandhi had many critics in the international peace movement. The Nobel Committee adviser referred to these critics in maintaining that he was not consistently pacifist, that he should have known that some of his non-violent campaigns towards the British would degenerate into violence and terror. This was something that had happened during the first Non-Cooperation Campaign in 1920-1921, e.g. when a crowd in Chauri Chaura, the United Provinces, attacked a police station, killed many of the policemen and then set fire to the police station.

A frequent criticism from non-Indians was also that Gandhi was too much of an Indian nationalist. In his report, Professor Worm-Müller expressed his own doubts as to whether Gandhi's ideals were meant to be universal or primarily Indian: "One might say that it is significant that his well-known struggle in South Africa was on behalf of the Indians only, and not of the blacks whose living conditions were even worse."

The name of the 1937 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was to be Lord Cecil of Chelwood. We do not know whether the Norwegian Nobel Committee seriously considered awarding the Peace Prize to Gandhi that year, but it seems rather unlikely. Ole Colbjørnsen renominated him both in 1938 and in 1939, but ten years were to pass before Gandhi made the committee's short list again.

Every year since 1901 the Nobel Prize has been awarded for achievements in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace. The Nobel Prize is an international award administered by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1968, Sveriges Riksbank established The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize. Each prize consists of a medal, personal diploma, and a cash award.

In 1947 the nominations of Gandhi came by telegram from India, via the Norwegian Foreign Office. The nominators were B.G. Kher, Prime Minister of Bombay, Govindh Bhallabh Panth, Premier of United Provinces, and Mavalankar, the President of the Indian Legislative Assembly. Their arguments in support of his candidacy were written in telegram style, like the one from Govind Bhallabh Panth: "Recommend for this year Nobel Prize Mahatma Gandhi architect of the Indian nation the greatest living exponent of the moral order and the most effective champion of world peace today." There were to be six names on the Nobel Committee's short list, Mohandas Gandhi was one of them.

The Nobel Committee's adviser, the historian Jens Arup Seip, wrote a new report which is primarily an account of Gandhi's role in Indian political history after 1937. "The following ten years," Seip wrote, "from 1937 up to 1947, led to the event which for Gandhi and his movement was at the same time the greatest victory and the worst defeat – India's independence and India's partition." The report describes how Gandhi acted in the three different, but mutually related conflicts which the Indian National Congress had to handle in the last decade before independence: the struggle between the Indians and the British; the question of India's participation in the Second World War; and, finally, the conflict between Hindu and Muslim communities. In all these matters, Gandhi had consistently followed his own principles of non-violence.

The Seip report was not critical towards Gandhi in the same way as the report written by Worm-Müller ten years earlier. It was rather favourable, yet not explicitly supportive. Seip also wrote briefly on the ongoing separation of India and the new Muslim state, Pakistan, and concluded – rather prematurely it would seem today: "It is generally considered, as expressed for example in The Times of 15 August 1947, that if 'the gigantic surgical operation' constituted by the partition of India, has not led to bloodshed of much larger dimensions, Gandhi's teachings, the efforts of his followers and his own presence, should get a substantial part of the credit."

Having read the report, the members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee must have felt rather updated on the last phase of the Indian struggle for independence. However, the Nobel Peace Prize had never been awarded for that sort of struggle. The committee members also had to consider the following issues: Should Gandhi be selected for being a symbol of non-violence, and what political effects could be expected if the Peace Prize was awarded to the most prominent Indian leader – relations between India and Pakistan were far from developing peacefully during the autumn of 1947?

From the diary of committee chairman Gunnar Jahn, we now know that when the members were to make their decision on October 30, 1947, two acting committee members, the Christian conservative Herman Smitt Ingebretsen and the Christian liberal Christian Oftedal spoke in favour of Gandhi. One year earlier, they had strongly favoured John Mott, the YMCA leader. It seems that they generally preferred candidates who could serve as moral and religious symbols in a world threatened by social and ideological conflicts. However, in 1947 they were not able to convince the three other members. The Labour politician Martin Tranmæl was very reluctant to award the Prize to Gandhi in the midst of the Indian-Pakistani conflict, and former Foreign Minister Birger Braadland agreed with Tranmæl. Gandhi was, they thought, too strongly committed to one of the belligerents. In addition both Tranmæl and Jahn had learnt that, one month earlier, at a prayer-meeting, Gandhi had made a statement which indicated that he had given up his consistent rejection of war. Based on a telegram from Reuters, The Times, on September 27, 1947, under the headline "Mr. Gandhi on 'war' with Pakistan" reported:

"Mr. Gandhi told his prayer meeting to-night that, though he had always opposed all warfare, if there was no other way of securing justice from Pakistan and if Pakistan persistently refused to see its proved error and continued to minimise it, the Indian Union Government would have to go to war against it. No one wanted war, but he could never advise anyone to put up with injustice. If all Hindus were annihilated for a just cause he would not mind. If there was war, the Hindus in Pakistan could not be fifth columnists. If their loyalty lay not with Pakistan they should leave it. Similarly Muslims whose loyalty was with Pakistan should not stay in the Indian Union."

Gandhi had immediately stated that the report was correct, but incomplete. At the meeting he had added that he himself had not changed his mind and that "he had no place in a new order where they wanted an army, a navy, an air force and what not".

Both Jahn and Tranmæl knew that the first report had not been complete, but they had become very doubtful. Jahn in his diary quoted himself as saying: "While it is true that he (Gandhi) is the greatest personality among the nominees – plenty of good things could be said about him – we should remember that he is not only an apostle for peace; he is first and foremost a patriot. (...) Moreover, we have to bear in mind that Gandhi is not naive. He is an excellent jurist and a lawyer." It seems that the Committee Chairman suspected Gandhi's statement one month earlier to be a deliberate step to deter Pakistani aggression. Three of five members thus being against awarding the 1947 Prize to Gandhi, the Committee unanimously decided to award it to the Quakers.

Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on 30 January 1948, two days before the closing date for that year's Nobel Peace Prize nominations. The Committee received six letters of nomination naming Gandhi; among the nominators were the Quakers and Emily Greene Balch, former Laureates. For the third time Gandhi came on the Committee's short list – this time the list only included three names – and Committee adviser Seip wrote a report on Gandhi's activities during the last five months of his life. He concluded that Gandhi, through his course of life, had put his profound mark on an ethical and political attitude which would prevail as a norm for a large number of people both inside and outside India: "In this respect Gandhi can only be compared to the founders of religions."

Nobody had ever been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously. But according to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation in force at that time, the Nobel Prizes could, under certain circumstances, be awarded posthumously. Thus it was possible to give Gandhi the prize. However, Gandhi did not belong to an organisation, he left no property behind and no will; who should receive the Prize money? The Director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, August Schou, asked another of the Committee's advisers, lawyer Ole Torleif Røed, to consider the practical consequences if the Committee were to award the Prize posthumously. Røed suggested a number of possible solutions for general application. Subsequently, he asked the Swedish prize-awarding institutions for their opinion. The answers were negative; posthumous awards, they thought, should not take place unless the laureate died after the Committee's decision had been made.

On November 18, 1948, the Norwegian Nobel Committee decided to make no award that year on the grounds that "there was no suitable living candidate". Chairman Gunnar Jahn wrote in his diary: "To me it seems beyond doubt that a posthumous award would be contrary to the intentions of the testator." According to the chairman, three of his colleagues agreed in the end, only Mr. Oftedal was in favour of a posthumous award to Gandhi.

Later, there have been speculations that the committee members could have had another deceased peace worker than Gandhi in mind when they declared that there was "no suitable living candidate", namely the Swedish UN envoy to Palestine, Count Bernadotte, who was murdered in September 1948. Today, this can be ruled out; Bernadotte had not been nominated in 1948. Thus it seems reasonable to assume that Gandhi would have been invited to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize had he been alive one more year.

Each year the respective Nobel Committees send individual invitations to thousands of members of academies, university professors, and scientists from numerous countries, previous Nobel Laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies and others, asking them to submit candidates for the Nobel Prizes for the coming year. These nominators are chosen in such a way that as many countries and universities as possible are represented over time.

Name of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman came onto lime light of some of the former Nobel Prize laureates following publication of his biography. While non-Bengali laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize are admiring the "greatest contribution" of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, unfortunately enough, none of the Bangla speaking former laureates are pressing the idea in favor of Mujib, which is seen by many as extreme narrowness.

 Note: References for this article are taken from the official website of Nobel Prize with gratitude.

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