14 DAY TRIAL // A blonde-haired and blue-eyed 21-year-old beauty queen has stepped forward to speak of bullying and racial discrimination on the Miss IndiaNZ beauty pageant, where she was told to the face she was “not Indian enough” to win.
According to the Telegraph, Jacinta Lal is born to a Indo-Fijian father and a New Zealander mother, which explains her lighter skin and locks.
While on the competition, she was repeatedly told she had no right to be there because she of her looks – in other words, she was too white to even consider taking part in the contest.
“There is no difference between what Paul Henry is saying and what those select few Indians were saying. They are all wrong and they should not say things like that,” Lal tells the media about how she was treated on the pageant.
The Paul Henry reference is included because her case goes public only days after the Indian government protested against him for using “racial slurs” in his television show.
Lal’s case got media attention after the mother of her boyfriend, Serena Fiso, decided to go on the record with the discrimination she was subjected to by setting up a Facebook account, the same British media outlet says.
“It was just appalling, it was so disgraceful. We were just dumbfounded,” Mrs. Fiso says of how Lal’s was treated on the beauty pageant.
“The Indian community seem to have taken great offence to Henry’s comments but, when I attended that beauty pageant, I saw huge offence coming back the other way,” she adds.
Contacted for comment, Dharmesh Parikh, the Miss IndiaNZ organizer, tried to downplay the incident, saying he’d only received “two or three” complaints from people asking whether Lal really had the right to be on the show.
Seeing how she’s blonde with blue eyes, that may seem like a logical assumption, he says. Still, he does make one clarification about the pageant.
“People said: ‘Oh my God, look at this blonde girl coming to Miss IndiaNZ, what is she doing here?’ But this event is called Miss IndiaNZ, with an N-Z, and I strongly emphasize that this event is not an Indian event, it is a Kiwi-Indian event,” Mr. Parikh says.