Three pioneering women — Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberian Leymah Gbowee and Tawakul Karman of Yemen — won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize Friday.
The Nobel committee recognized them for their “non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”
It made me think, as I always do every October when this coveted prize is announced, about the life of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, known to the world as the Mahatma, or great soul.
And that he was.
The driver of India’s independence movement, Gandhi remains the world’s strongest symbol of contemporary non-violent practices, his civil disobedience practices served as a model for the civil rights movement in America.
He was nominated for the peace prize in 1937, 1938. 1939, 1947 (the year India won freedom from Britain) and in 1948, just before he was assassinated. That year, the Nobel committee decided to make no award on the grounds that “there was no suitable living candidate.’
Something to think about.
