Dear Miss Nepal, you do not represent us!
Having followed Miss Nepal closely for years now, I wanted to share my two cents on the hate Samriddhi Rai received from the former Miss Nepals for speaking of her experiences with Miss Nepal and pageantry.
As you might have already guessed from the title, I am not a fan of Miss Nepal, and my reason is that Miss Nepal DOES NOT REPRESENT NEPALI WOMEN! It only represents a subset of Nepali women, cis-women who are a certain height, look a certain way, and belong to a particular socio-economic class. How often do you see someone who is 5'3" as Miss Nepal? Never because the participants are required to be at least 5'4", and on what basis was this decided? I remember one of the former Miss Nepals justifying this by claiming that representatives from other countries are usually taller. But don’t you think our representatives should represent the Nepali population more than any other population group in the world? And, the average Nepali women 4'11" tall. Also, I have never seen a plus-size woman or a transwoman or someone from a lower-middle-class family making it to the top or participate at all in Miss Nepal.
Now, let’s discuss why Samriddhi Rai has every right to share her experience with Miss Nepal, and if she thinks the system is flawed, she can talk about it. The former Miss Nepals did not need to gang up against her and start personal attacks, which are irrelevant to the discussion.
Samriddhi, in her interview, shared her experience with Miss Nepal and shared how she believes that Miss Nepal does not empower women and how many things that go in the pageantry is morally wrong. Honestly, a lot of us have been saying the same thing. In the past, Miss Nepal has been called out for selecting winners based on how much money a contestant could bring in, caste, and for mistreating women coming from a lower socio-economic background.
One of the former Miss Nepal suggested that Samriddhi should not have talked about her experiences in an interview and instead should have opted for a private table talk. Also, she went ahead and said Samriddhi was spreading negativity and hate. How is sharing one’s experience spreading hate? Also, it is up to Samriddhi to decide how and with whom to share her experiences. I clearly remember this same Miss Nepal calling out Miss World and Julia for being biased towards Nepal on her Facebook (instead of reaching out to the Miss World organization personally for a private table talk) during Miss World 2012 when then Miss Nepal Shristi Shrestha did not make it to Top 15. Coming out to the public and sharing her story must have been difficult for her, and as a woman, you should not invalidate another woman’s struggles. You can disagree, but you cannot INVALIDATE her experiences!
Another former Miss Nepal spoke ill of Samriddhi and started attacking her personally, called her various names, including a loser. Like for real? Samriddhi is an artist who represents us — Nepali women and our experiences better than many of the former Miss Nepals. Many other titleholders then joined and started a group attack on her. They called her a loser, liar, ugly, among many other hateful things. Ganging up against a woman and calling her names for speaking her mind show why not many women in Nepal talk openly about their experiences. Why is it that women instead of supporting another woman, work to bring her down, gaslight her experiences, and call her ugly names?
Dear, former Miss Nepals, you have the right to defend the organization. Still, you cannot disrespect, gang up against, and make personal attacks against Samriddhi for sharing her experiences. Moreover, you cannot show that you all ganging up against her, and calling her names is what other Nepali women like me believe in. You neither look or talk like one of us. You do not represent us, at least not in name-calling and ganging up against another woman!