Perhaps it’s time to abandon the Nobel prize altogether

Much ink has been spilled on rescinding the Nobel Peace Prize from 1991 winner, Myanmar first State Councillor Aung San Suu Kyi, because of her willful blindness to what the United Nations has termed “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” of Rohingya Muslims in her country. She does not even acknowledge the problem, and has rebuffed even the Dalai Lama’s call for compassionately dealing with the Rohingyas. The Nobel committee says it doesn’t take back awards, and not without reason; also, she deservedly won the prize for her long years of incarceration that helped return democracy to Myanmar.

Some talk of strengthening the criteria for the prize. That sounds wishful and impossible to achieve, given the subjectivity of awards and the politicisation of the Nobel prize. The world regards the prize as the Mount Olympus of science, literature and peace, but it is clear that the Nobel prize is merely an instrument of European influence — as was demonstrated when the peace prize went to former US President Barack Obama in 2009. He himself said he did not deserve it. Another non-deserving peace prize went to former US diplomat Henry Kissinger in 1973, for negotiating a cease-fire with North Vietnam, when in fact he had intensified the war and spread it to Laos and Cambodia. At least Aung San Suu Kyi earned her prize. So perhaps it is time to abandon the Nobel prize altogether. And not just for peace. In economics, for instance, a science that has a mixed record. Economics has helped humans collect data, but as a tool for interpreting the data, it has often proven as reliable as astrology. Economic theory comprises so many flip-flops that even Thomas Kuhn (who posited

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) would have been foxed. And it is basically a weapon in the worldwide “right vs left” debate.

Economists themselves have alleged that the Nobel prize exists basically to push “free market” theories. There was an uproar when Frederich Hayek (worshipped by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for his anti-state work) and Milton Friedman (who visited Argentina after the CIA-sponsored coup overthrew President Salvador Allende) won their prizes in the 1970s. Worse, there have been winners whose work on business cycles and gametheory were disproved just a few years later by the Great Recession of 2008. The Economics Prize is political, and actually the prize should have gone to mathematicians. No one argues that the prizes for physics, chemistry of medicine are inauthentic, and math is the language of science and nature.

Another prize that appears to be a lottery is the literature award, which Salman Rushdie has openly hankered for despite writing trash since the late 1980s. (At least others are quiet about it.) The award is so secretive that even the global literati have no idea whose turn is next. Perhaps the award for literature gave geniuses like Gabriel Garcia Marquez a wider audience, but then the writer who birthed 20th century magical realism, Gunter Grass, won the prize long after Marquez did. And Bob Dylan, the great American folklorist who introduced personalised song-writing for popular musicians has never needed wider exposure; in fact as great as he is, and I love his Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, no novelist could have been happy with his award because his was a separate art altogether.

The list of literature awardees shows a bias in favour of European writers, as if they held the key to thought and expression. If a Chinese writer wins, it is usually not because the committee admired his/her language or craft, but because the writer was a dissident. It is then a political award, a European snubbing of the control that Chinese government exerts over its society — which is not the job of a prize.

For writers in English, it is likely that the Booker prize that carries more weight simply because it increases book sales. In India, the Sahitya Akademi award matters more to writers in non-English languages. Everyone nonetheless wants the Nobel, but its awarding is so capricious and political that I bet that Arundhati Roy will win the Literature prize long before Salman Rushdie, if ever, he does.

There are two Indians who illustrate the irrelevance of the Nobel prize. Rajendra Pachauri happened to chair the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change when it was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Pachauri thereafter went around introducing himself publicly as a Nobel laureate. Worse, he sexually harassed subordinates, as if the Nobel prize (that wasn’t his but the IPCC’s, anyway) was an invincibility shield.

Kailash Satyarthi, who shared the 2014 peace prize with Malala Yousafzai, has kept a low-profile and has continued his work with children, the most vulnerable section of any society. Currently he is on a “Bharat Yatra” that you will not read about or watch on the news; it deals with labour exploitation and sexual abuse of children, among other things. He welcomed his award but it made no difference to his work: he quietly soldiers on. He would likely be unmoved if the Nobel prize was ended, once and for all.

The world regards the prize as the Mount Olympus of science, literature and peace, but it is clear that the Nobel prize is merely an instrument of European influence