Why do most of the contestants and winners of Miss Nepal beauty pageant belong to BCN (Bahun Chhetri Newar) trio of ethnicities?
My tentative answer is that they are the most privileged groups in the country, and the pageant is of the BCN, by the BCN, for the BCN!
COMMITTED, in the process of expanding, recently advertised fourteen different positions. Reproduced in this blog post are charts of the applications by age, gender, caste etc.
A reproduction of a really challenging and resourceful Facebook post by a White American friend of mine for White Americans about being White and addressing racism. I hope you find this as useful as I have, in spite of NOT being white, nor American.
I have come across Nepali men, in person, on social media and elsewhere, who, when discussing gender issues, display a very very remarkable lack of knowledge and understanding of the issues faced by our girls and women. In the process, they display their conceit, their complete ignorance of the patriarchal society we live in and how that benefits and privileges us, men.
This is just one example of that.
White privilege is something a white person enjoys by virtue of his/her skin color. No white person gets discriminated BECAUSE of his/her white skin color, the way a non-white person frequently is, for instance. No white person is denied something BECAUSE of his/her skin color, the way a non-white person frequently is, to give another example.
Structural privilege in Nepal is Khas privilege and, as such, enjoyed by all Khas Nepalese. No Khas Nepalese suffer BECAUSE they are Khas. That is a privilege ALL Khas enjoy. Non-Khas Nepalese, however, suffer in a number of ways BECAUSE they are non-Khas.
A meme, using completely false reasoning, tries to prove that there isn't any discrimination in Nepal. But, ironically, in the way the the non-Khas-Aryas are characterised in the meme, the creator ends up outing himself or herself as a bigot!
The incredibly homogeneous power structure of Nepal is an anachronistic slap in the face of the equally incredibly diverse population of the country.
How do some Nepalese see statistics about composition of different bodies in Nepal?
While a few explain away the disproportionate representation of the High Caste by ascribing it to education, others are against disseminating such information because, according to them, they promote animosity and inter-caste hatred etc. These "educated" Nepalese fail to see/understand -- among other things -- how information is actually educational and empowering!
Social structure propped up, supported and perpetuated by Nepal's very highly patriarchal caste system has given rise to a bureaucractic and political--and other--systems that's characterized by deplorable structural inequality, which many of those responsible aren't able to understand or, if they do, will not acknowledge.
But there is a solution!