Pageant as 'rating agency'

Why India is sitting pretty in global perception

India leapfrogged up the World Bank Doing Business index. Moody’s upgraded its India rating a notch. Standard & Poor’s was unmoved. Fitch remains taciturn. Confused about what the world really thinks about the Indian economy? Perhaps a 20-year-old medical student called Manushi Chhillar could provide another handy proxy.
 
Ms Chhillar, the winner of the 2017 Miss World pageant, is the sixth Indian woman to hold the title. Only the naïve believe that the outcome of that competition or of its sister pageant, Miss Universe, recently owned by an American president, are predicated on physical beauty and brains. Political compulsions, as dictated by Western owners (one British, one American) of both pageants, play as much of a role. Ms Chhillar’s win can legitimately be viewed from that perspective. 

 
Consider the trajectory of India’s pageant wins. The first Indian to win the Miss World title was Reita Faria, a Goan, who was also the first Asian to win the title. That was in 1966, when India was emerging from the first troubled decade after Independence, holding the promise of faster growth. Indira Gandhi had dutifully devalued the rupee in response to IMF pressures, ignoring criticisms about a “sellout to America”. Besides, Asia was just plugging into global supply chains, beginning the process that transformed these tiny nations into the world’s tiger economies.
 

Thereafter, Mrs Gandhi embarked on her nationalisation spree of banks and natural resource companies and India closed its doors to the world. Indian women gamely continued to compete in global beauty pageants with little success. Our best shot came in the late seventies when the Bengali champion swimmer and actor Nafisa Ali made it to second runner-up in the Miss International contest, considered number three in the Big Four global beauty pageants (Miss Earth is the fourth). 

 
Then came 1991 and economic reform. India re-engaged with the world after two lost decades. By 1994, India scored a double, walking off with the Miss World (Aishwarya Rai) and Miss Universe (Sushmita Sen) titles. This is no small achievement: consider that China, which had started its spectacular transformation as the world's global factory in 1977, had not won a single title till then — it would win its first Miss World title only in 2007.
 
India, meanwhile, saw economic growth creep up as foreign direct investment poured in and Indians grew more prosperous. India won the Miss World titles again in 1997, 1999 and 2000. The last-mentioned year saw India do a second double by winning the Miss Universe title as well. In fact, such victories had become regular enough to lose a little of their sheen as the years went by.

 
The link between global politics and beauty pageants is no coincidence. Russia, for instance, won its first Miss World title in 1992, after that country emerged from four decades behind the Iron Curtain. A quick scan of the Big Two winners from the fifties shows that after mainly European winners in the first few years, South America, the emerging market darling of the seventies and eighties, started figuring in a major way. The first native African to win the title (a Nigerian) did so at the 2001 pageant held, significantly, in post-Apartheid South Africa.       
 
Overall, India figures high in a BRICS beauty pageant tally. Eight titles in all, to Brazil’s four, China's two and Russia’s two. In Miss Universe titles, India (two) leads Brazil (one). Neither China nor Russia has won this title. More encouragingly, India, the world’s fourth largest carbon emitter, holds one Miss Earth title (Nicole Faria of Bangalore). Brazil holds two. China, the world’s largest emitter, and Russia, the fifth largest, have none. Other indices may say otherwise, but in terms of beauty pageants at least India can be said to be sitting pretty in global perception.