Miss Nepal hopes to outsmart Maoists by dropping Dabur tag

KATHMANDU - After being blocked by the Maoists, Nepal’s oldest and best known beauty pageant, Miss Nepal, is finally scheduled to be held Thursday without drawing attention to its Indian sponsor, Dabur Nepal, which is thought to be the actual target of the former guerrillas.

The Dabur Vatika Miss Nepal contest, which was sponsored by Indian ayurvedic product manufacturer Dabur to promote its Dabur Vatika range of cosmetics for women, has now been repositioned as the Fem Miss Nepal 2009 pageant in a bid to downplay the role of the Indian company that the Maoists have been pressuring the pageant organisers to replace.

This June, the Dabur India board approved the acquisition of Fem Care Pharma Ltd, mainly known for its bleaching and depilatory products.

While Fem bleaching products are available in Nepal, so far, buyers are yet to associate them with Dabur the way they do the Real fruit juice and Vatika products.

Miss Nepal, started 15 years ago, could not be held last year due to opposition by the women’s wing of the Maoists who said the pageant degraded women as commodities.

With a Maoist-led government ruling Nepal last year, it was impossible to hold the pageant after the former rebels allegedly threatened the show’s media partners, the venue authorities and even some of the contestants.

When the Maoist government fell in May, the Hidden Treasure, the event management company franchised to hold the pageant, announced the show would be resumed.

Sixteen women, including the first Muslim contestant, have been shortlisted to take part in the show on Thursday.

Given just about three weeks’ time to organise the event, the Hidden Treasure has downscaled the hoopla to hold the grand finale in the army club instead of the stately Birendra International Convention Centre, where it was held in the past.

Soon after the event management company announced it was going ahead with Miss Nepal 2009 in September, the Maoists said they would oppose it.

“The Maoists have the freedom to oppose the show but we also have the freedom to hold it in a democracy,” said Subarna Chhetri, former chairman of Hidden Treasure.

“The participants are adults and have the consent of their families. Also, the government has given us the right to hold the show and we pay taxes for that.”

Out of deference to Nepal’s still conservative society, Miss Nepal does not have a swim suit round.

The new Miss Nepal would be able to take part in the Miss World 2009 pageant to be held in Johannesburg in December.

In the past, the Miss Nepal show had been halted twice more. The first time was in 2000 when Nepal was in national mourning following the assassination of King Birendra and nine more members of the royal family.

The second time it was shelved was six years later when Birendra’s successor King Gyanendra seized absolute power through an army-backed coup and triggered widespread protests that caused his regime to fall in April 2006.