Pakistan May Not Be Ready for Its Beauty Queen

Natasha Paracha, United Nations worker, was crowned Miss Pakistan World this May in a pageant held in, well, Ontario.

Ms. Paracha, who works at the United Nations and has lived in the United States since age 2, allowed that there might be some backlash in Pakistan, a conservative Muslim state, if one of its representatives were to compete internationally in a bikini. Indeed, Amna Buttar, a founder of the Asian-American Network Against Abuse of Human Rights, who lives in Lahore, pointed out that there is currently a scandal brewing in Pakistan over a leak of photographs of the daughter of the governor of Punjab swimming in a bikini.

“In Pakistan, we are trying to get basic rights for women: right to marry, right to divorce, equal opportunity for job and education, and issues like Miss Pakistan create problems for this movement,” Ms. Buttar said in an e-mail message. “An average Pakistani young woman does not want to wear a bikini in public, and for her it is important to have equal opportunity and all focus should be on that, and not on a pageant where only the elite can participate.”
The founder of the pageant, a Toronto entrepreneur named Sonia Ahmed, said that she had been making plans to take the pageant to Pakistan as soon as next year until the fall of President Pervez Musharraf, whose government was considered relatively open to the advancement of women — which in Pakistan, at least, meant the conditions were relatively favorable for aspiring beauty queens. Now, she is keeping the pageant in Canada because she cannot guarantee the security of contestants.

“It may only be like 1 percent of the total population, but the fundamentalist problem is still present in Pakistan,” Ms. Ahmed said.

Since she was crowned in May, Ms. Paracha, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, has limited her appearances to the United States, speaking at a gathering of nonresident Pakistanis in New York, showing up at a Pakistan Day celebration in Washington, raising money for Vision of Development, a nonprofit agency that she started in high school to support rural Pakistani women, and making the occasional media appearance.

This month, she went on CNN to urge her country to stand up and condemn the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, except that she accidentally used the word condone. Fortunately, it was clear from the context what she meant, and no international incidents ensued. (Slip of the tongue or not, her comments were an improvement on those of a previous Miss Pakistan: calling President Musharraf a “hunk” she’d like to date.)

So Ms. Paracha is a beauty queen, unlike most others in some important regards, and a lot like them in others: a comely ambassador for her country who’s eager to avoid controversy, promote her country and be a good role model for young women (she’s also an accomplished flamenco dancer). She told CNN she’d like “to show that Pakistani women are strong and we can definitely do a lot to represent the nation on a global sphere.”