The 72nd Miss World beauty pageant is scheduled to take place in Hyderabad from May 7 to May 31, 2025, hosted by the Telangana government.

• The event aims to promote tourism under the banner of ‘Telangana Zaroor Aana’ (Come to Telangana definitely).
• However, the announcement has triggered strong protests from women’s organisations across the country.

Issues regarding Beauty for Pageant

• Past Protests: Beauty pageants in India have faced public resistance since their early editions, from Bangalore (1996) to Mumbai (2024).
• Capitalism and Patriarchy: Despite evolving formats, beauty pageants continue to evaluate women based on physical appearance, raising concerns about the capitalist-patriarchal nexus.
• Aspirational Platforms: For many young women, particularly in countries like India, beauty pageants offer validation, exposure, and opportunities in media or public life.
  • Notable Indian winners like Aishwarya Rai, Priyanka Chopra, and Manushi Chhillar have become global ambassadors for various causes, portraying pageants as empowering platforms.
• Limits of Empowerment: While pageants are marketed as empowering, they often objectify women’s bodies for public consumption and corporate sponsorships.
  • The empowerment presented is conditional and rooted in a narrow, appearance-centric definition of success.
• Question of Priorities: The choice of hosting beauty pageants over forums focused on women’s health, employment, innovation, or rural development raises concerns about the patriarchal mindset.  
  • Such choices often link women’s value to their physical appearance, rather than their contributions to society.

Way Forward

• Rethinking Priorities: True empowerment should focus on safety, dignity, and agency, not just how a woman performs on a stage or the global visibility she gains.
• Rethinking Empowerment: The debate around beauty pageants should not be reduced to simplistic binaries. It must instead question collective values about representation, the messages we amplify, and how we define empowerment.

Conclusion

As women’s groups continue to protest, they defend a broader vision: one where women are celebrated for who they are and what they contribute, rather than solely for how they look.

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