IS it any wonder that it is Narendra Modi whom a South Korean Prize Committee has chosen to honour? Given the demands of geopolitics, one shouldn’t be too surprised if the Indian prime minister gets a Nobel prize as well.

Each year the Nobel committee honours men and women who work for peace and for humanity’s good. Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Yasser Arafat and our own Malala Yousafzai fall in this category. The recipients, for the most part, are deserving. But there is often the odd choice.

Consider the following. Like many Ashkenazi Zionist leaders who ‘returned’ to Palestine, Nobel laureate Menachem Begin was born in Belorussia, then part of the Czarist empire. He gained notoriety for his terrorism activities in ‘mandated’ Palestine, where he worked for a Zionist militant outfit. His tour de force was the bombing of King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. The bombing killed 91 people, including 17 Palestinian Jews. As Israel’s prime minister, and despite having innocent blood on his hands, Begin received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. Four years later, he invaded Lebanon leading to mass civilian deaths, including the ones in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Now, more than seven decades later, another leader accused of large-scale murder has received the Seoul Peace Prize.

Under the watch of Mr Modi, then chief minister of Gujarat, 2,000 people were killed in an act of carnage that sent shockwaves across the world. His ‘keep away’ order to his police enabled a mob to go on a killing-and-arson spree. A Muslim lawmaker was burnt alive. New Delhi-based EU diplomats who visited Gujarat concluded that the architect of the killings was the chief minister himself.

No wonder, many Western countries refused to grant him a visa — a decision later revoked when he became prime minister. In future, it would be better for an organisation conferring such an award on the likes of the BJP leader to call it anything but a peace prize.

Published in Dawn, March 4th, 2019