The 2014 Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi of India and Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan for “for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Friday. The Nobel Committee regards it as an important point for an Indian and a Pakistani, to join in a common struggle for education and against extremism. Many other individuals and institutions in the international community have also contributed. It has been calculated that there are 168 million child labourers around the world today. In 2000 the figure was 78 million higher.
Kailash Satyarthi was in his nondescript office in a scruffy, traffic-choked neighbourhood in south Delhi when he learned on Twitter that he had won the Nobel peace prize. Minutes later the 60-year-old activist received a call from the Nobel committee. The seventh Indian to win the Nobel peace prize, Satyarthi is a familiar figure for journalists and campaigners working on child labour matters. Trim, soft-spoken, articulate, passionate and amiable, Satyarthi has kept a low profile. He worked with Guardian Films on a documentary about modern-day slavery in Assam. In the film, he led a raid to rescue a girl trafficked from a tea estate into domestic slavery in Delhi.
During filming, he explained the dangers of his work. “In my own case I have my broken leg and my broken head and my broken back and my broken shoulder, so different parts of my body have been broken while I was trying to rescue children.
“It is a challenge definitely and I know that it is a long battle to fight, but slavery is unacceptable; it is a crime against humanity. I’m not talking in legal terms; morally I feel I cannot tolerate the loss of freedom of any single child in my own country so I am a kind of restless person in that sense. We cannot accept this to happen.” This is how Kailash Satyarthi had explained his experience to a journalist who had sought to interview him before he won the Nobel Prize.
Last week he was on a raid on a factory suspected of using children as cheap labour. In his 34 years as an activist, Satyarthi has freed tens of thousands of young Indians, some just five or six years old, forced into servitude by unscrupulous agents, businessmen, landowners and brothel owners.
Satyarthi has said his commitment to the cause goes back to when he was six and noticed a boy his age on the steps outside the school with his father, cleaning shoes.
Born in Vidisha, in Madhya Pradesh state, Satyarthi, the son of a police officer, studied electrical engineering at a Government college. His first campaigns involved a football club using membership fees to pay the school fees of needy children, while another project became a book bank in his home town.
In 1980 Satyarthi founded the Bachpan Bachao Andolan (Save the Childhood Movement) and began raiding factories, brick kilns and carpet-making workshops where children and their indebted parents often pledge themselves to work for decades in return for a short-term loan. Frequently, the loan remains unpaid back from meagre earnings and people are repeatedly resold. In the late 1990s, Satyarthi was a lead organiser of the Global March against Child Labour, aimed at raising consciousness about millions of children abused worldwide in a form of modern slavery. Academics remember him excoriating Government officials who claimed at international conferences that the problem did not exist in India.
He also founded Rug Mark, an international scheme that tags all carpets made in factories certified as child labour-free. More recently he has launched operations to rescue girls sold into abusive forced marriages and helped turn hundreds of villages into rehabilitation centres to teach trades to abused teenagers.
Relatives said Satyarthi, a married father of two, had been influenced by the thinking of Mahatma Gandhi and other Indian social activists of the 1950s and 60s. On knowing that he was selected for Nobel Prize, he remained calm and composed and there was serenity on his face. “I think of it all as a test. This is a moral examination that one has to pass … to stand up against such social evils,” he said in 2010.
Malala Yusufzai, the 17 year old girl from Pakistan became a household name around the globe when, in October 2012, she was shot in the head by a Taliban assassin while on her way to school. The young girl had been an outspoken advocate of girls’ education before the shooting. Afterward, she became an international beacon for the cause and was chosen as TIME’s runner-up for Person of the Year in 2012. She was later named one of the world’s 100 Most Influential People. Now, at age 17, she is the youngest-ever Nobel Laureate. She first came to public attention through that heartfelt diary, published on BBC Urdu, which chronicled her desire to remain in education and for girls to have the chance to be educated.
She was named one of TIME magazine’s most influential people in 2013, put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013, won the European Parliament’s Sakharov prize for Freedom of Thought and her autobiography “I Am Malala” was released last year and reversioned for younger audiences.
Malala was only 11 years old when her anonymous diary – published between January and March 2009 on BBC Urdu – captivated audiences with its heartfelt account of the struggle for girls’ education at a time when the Taliban controlled Swat. Militants destroyed scores of girls schools in the time the Taliban wielded power over the Valley. They had an implacable attitude to female education and this was Malala’s primary concern.
Malala broadened her campaign worldwide advocating education for the girls irrespective of faith and colour or other distinctions. In fact she has shown the path to the girls in backward and less developed countries of Asia and Africa that they can rise and fight for the rights of the girls to education and freedom,
We congratulate both the winners of Nobel Prize for 2014 as they have brought great honour to their respective countries and societies.
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