Mahatma Gandhi's assassination in 1948 forced the Nobel Prize Committee, who had unanimously decided to confer him with the top honour after short-listing the Indian leader for the five times, to abandon the plan.

"(Mahatma) Gandhi was short-listed for the Nobel Prize five times," Norwegian Nobel committee chief Ole Danbolt Mjos has revealed.

"For the first four, majority opinion made sure he did not come by the prize. But then, at the end of 1947, the Nobel Committee finally reached a unanimous decision that, come 1948, the Indian nationalist leader would be the recipient of the prize," Mjos told The Daily Star newspaper in Dhaka.

But, Mjos said, as events were to turn out Gandhi was assassinated in January 1948 upsetting the Nobel committee's plan at the last moment.

Nobody was conferred with the Nobel Peace Prize in 1948, the website of the committee shows.

The Nobel committee chief was asked why Gandhi, the man from whom Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela learnt about non-violence, was never deemed qualified to be a Nobel laureate.

Asked could he not have been honoured posthumously in the way former UN secretary general Dag Hammarskjoeld was in 1961, Mjos did not give a clear answer,

But, Djos added that the posthumous honour for Hammarskjoeld was a one-time affair and is not likely to be repeated.