Why did Mahatma Gandhi never get the Nobel Peace Prize?

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It is quite possible that because Churchill was known to loathe Ghandi the Nobel Peace Prize was not awarded to him for political reasons. "It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor." - Winston Churchill, 1930 http://www.kamat.com/mmgandhi/churchill.htm Nov 03 09, 9:48 PM

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I think this is a good answer. See also this comment about a member of the Nobel Committee in Norway. Quote: 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." http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/ A minor error: Professor Worm-Müller was an adviser, not a member of the Nobel Committee. Nov 04 09, 1:24 PM

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