In a year of rapidly proliferating conflicts, the Norwegian Nobel Committee on
In a year of rapidly proliferating conflicts, the Norwegian Nobel Committee on Friday renewed attention on one of the world’s most durable and dangerous standoffs by splitting its annual peace prize between a teenage Pakistani activist and a graying Indian Gandhian.
The richly symbolic selection brings together individuals who took very different paths to the award, but who hold much in common in their outspoken advocacy for the rights of children.
The pick also reaches across ethnic, religious and political lines to kindle new hopes for peace on the South Asian subcontinent, where one-fifth of the world’s population lives.
The conflict between India and Pakistan — a tense showdown between nuclear-armed neighbors that has featured four major wars over 67 years — has flared again in recent days, with cross-border shelling in the disputed region of Kashmir.
The prime ministers of the two nations may have an important and unusual chance to discuss the conflict in person in December at the Nobel awards ceremony, having been invited by the winners. Although there was no immediate response, the invitation puts pressure on both leaders to translate the warm feelings generated by Friday’s prize into more concrete progress toward a deescalation.
Malala Yousafzai, who at 17 became the youngest Nobel laureate, won the prize exactly two years and one day after she was nearly killed by a bullet to the head during a Taliban assassination attempt in her native Swat Valley. She was targeted for her outspoken advocacy of female education — a cause she has championed relentlessly ever since, in spite of further threats.
Speaking from the British city of Birmingham on Friday, she reveled in the committee’s decision to share her prize with an Indian, 60-year-old Kailash Satyarthi, who has spent decades crusading against child slavery.
The selection of Yousafzai and Satyarthi was heralded by leaders on both sides of the line dividing India from Pakistan. It was a rare occasion when both populations could celebrate the same event. Abdus Salam was the first Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize, when he captured the physics award in 1979. Satyarthi is the first Indian-born Nobel Peace Prize winner; Mother Teresa, a naturalized Indian citizen, won the Peace Prize in 1979.
But it was less clear whether the Peace Prize will actually change any of the underlying dynamics in a dispute that has never ended since India and Pakistan were violently partitioned from one another in 1947.