India is playing with fire over Miss World contest

By Gwynne Dyer

There is a land far away. Come with me, I'll take you there. India is calling, Waiting for you to dance in the sun.

LONDON (JP): The theme song for the Miss World International contest in India this weekend is as pathetic and outdated as the contest itself. But there's nothing funny about 15 women burning themselves to death to protest against another 89 women parading around a stage in a beauty pageant.

The contestants won't even be wearing swimsuits: that sequence was filmed in the Seychelles to avoid offending prudish Indian sensibilities. They will doubtless all insist on talking about their desire to work for world peace, but hypocrisy is not a hanging offense. The whole thing is a dumb relic of the 1950s, not an intolerable assault on anybody's traditional culture. Yet the Miss World show has shaken loose all the nuts in India.

The most extreme is Kinay Narayana Shashikala, a law student whose 'Forum for Awakening Women' previously restricted itself to demanding censorship of suggestive dance movements in Hindi films. She and 14 other women are planning to infiltrate the crowd of 20,000 at Chinnaswamy cricket stadium in Bangalore and set themselves alight before the television cameras, which will carry the Miss World spectacle to two billion people worldwide.

"Whatever the level of security," said Shashikala, "we will sneak in. We don't need petrol to douse ourselves; our nylon saris are inflammable." And they've thought of everything: it's apparently quite painful to burn to death, as she explained in one of the endless press conferences she has held over the past two weeks. So she and the other protesters have decided to take cyanide before breaking out the matches.

Now wait a minute, I hear you cry. For starters, shouldn't somebody tell Shashikala that dying from cyanide poisoning is even more agonizing than burning to death? And what is all this nonsense about two billion viewers, anyway?

The world barely contains two billion adult males, let alone two billion randy old goats who can only dream and drool. Besides, who needs beauty contests when you've got 'Baywatch'? Two billion is the size of the potential television audience for 'Miss World', but then the potential market for this column is 4,000 newspapers. Real life is different.

As a prestige international event, the Miss World pageant ranks somewhere behind summit meetings of the International Postal Union. The British Broadcasting Corporation, which dreamed up the Miss World contest back in 1951, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth, dropped it long ago. Even the slightly down- market ITV network abandoned it in 1988 as too stupid and embarrassing for words. Why should anybody care about it now?

Actually, they don't, much. That is the main reason Miss World is being held in India this year: there were not many other contenders for the honor. And yet, though it is supremely unimportant and utterly passe, it has monopolized the headlines in India for weeks.

National newspapers write leaders about it. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the old-left Communist Party of India (Marxist) both insist that it is a plot by Western multinationals to subvert Indian culture and promote foreign goods. One poor soul has already burned himself to death over it. An Indian high court has had to rule on its legality.

As the Indian newsmagazine Outlook wrote last week: "What are the signals that India is transmitting?...That our civilization is so feeble that it can be blown away by a bevy of beauties sashaying across TV screens. Surely something is seriously amiss."

The uproar is not really about a beauty contest at all. That is just a handy symbol for all those who are upset about the economic, social and sexual changes that come with modernization in India (just as they do everywhere else). For those most threatened by the changes -- rural people, the upper castes, men in general -- the most effective way to fight the changes is to externalize them, to claim that they are being forced on India from outside.

Into this already tense situation came indestructible old Eric Morley and his tatty 'Miss World' show, looking for a high- profile venue. In Bombay he met Amitabh Bachchan, an Indian movie mega-star who is not getting any younger either. They both have decades of experience with the workings of the publicity machine, and they know a good thing when they see it.

Next thing you know Bachchan is the host of the show and it's going to be held in Bangalore, India's thriving aerospace and computing capital. And within days everybody in India has adopted the Miss World pageant as this year's symbolic focus for the continuing battle between traditionalists and modernizers, with vast attendant publicity. As Morley and Bachchan doubtless foresaw.

It worked. There's certainly nothing else in the world that could have got me to write about the Miss World contest, let alone put me in the bizarre position of actually defending it. But when Indian Stalinists line up with Hindu ultra-nationalists who go around organizing pogroms against Moslems, you know you belong on the other side. The dignity of women may take a knock in Bangalore, but the pageant's enemies are a lot nastier than its supporters.

"The BJP opposes it in the name of Indian culture," said Brinda Karat, a prominent Indian feminist. "We consider this slogan of 'Indian culture' a euphemism for reinforcing the fundamentalist view of women as subordinate....They have a different agenda, and they are using a beauty contest to push that."

It is they who are providing Shashikala's matches. But she is probably bluffing: she likes giving press conferences too much.