BEAUTY killed Suresh Kumar, or else it was the exploitation of women, or else the assault on Indian cultural values. It all depends on how you look at it.
In the countdown to tonight's coronation of the next Miss World, being held in India for the first and possibly the last time, given the degree of opposition it has met, it seems there are countless ways of looking at an event that ordinarily seems so divested of meaning.
Weeks of protest and fears for the security of the contestants reached crisis point last week when Kumar, a 24 year old tailor, doused himself in petrol and set himself alight at a bus stand in the city of Madurai, 270 miles south of Bangalore.
Not everyone in India of course, shares Kumar's views. Hosted by Amitabh Bachchan India's biggest box office draw, Miss World has attracted a record 89 contestants, with 12,500 extra police requested to protect them.
The hotel where they are staying has become a magnet for rich Bangaloreans. The coffee shop is packed with oglers anxious for a glimpse of the beauty queens, whose days arc filled with rehearsals for the gala extravaganza, for which the Sultan of Brunei has reportedly bought 200 tickets, at 695 (£414) each.
Provided the protests don't force a scaling down of the grand finale, it will feature 60 decorated elephants, several hundred dancers, a candle lit map of India and a specially composed song: There is a land far away Come with me I'll take you there, India is calling waiting for you for a dance in the sun.
Miss World 1996 is only the latest in a series of western imports to have caused a furore in India. Like the other new arrivals - fast food restaurants, the fitness craze and US soap operas - the pageant has become a convenient symbol for a whole range of Indian organisations that arc not usually on speaking terms.
The Hindu right wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been at the forefront of the protests, describing the contest as a blot on Indian tradition; the Communist Party of India (Marxist), normally the harshest critic of the BJP, has been equally vociferous, arguing that Miss World diminishes women.
Maoist guerrillas have vowed to bomb it; farmers' groups have argued that it is part of a global plot by western multinationals to promote foreign goods; and a women's group, previously confined to calling for censorship of suggestive movements in Hindi movie dance sequences, has threatened to upstage it with a mass public suicide.
For weeks the group leader, K.N. Sasikala, has been offering alternative scenarios of how 15 volunteers will make the ultimate sacrifice, before settling on inflammable nylon saris.
But is it really worth dying for? For Suresh Kumar, it was.
"He has sacrificed himself for the cause, the great cause of women," said Pramila Nesargi, a member of the Karnataka state assembly for the BJP. "His name will go down in history for the cause of women and their honour and their right."
Nesargi has turned her words into actions, tying the pageant in knots by filing four separate legal challenges which could force the hosts to scale back the finals, or even cancel. The Karnataka High Court is to decide by tomorrow on her plea that the contest breaks liquor licensing and noise pollution laws and puts national security at risk because some events are being held on defence ministry land.
"It is against the Indian culture, it is against the Indian tradition, it is against all public morality and law and all the religions in the world," says Nesargi. "It is vulgar in its exposition, and it is commodifying women. A woman's beauty is not for sale and if she intends to sell it, she is reducing herself to chattel."
Not all women agree. Phoolan Devi, India's famous Bandit Queen and now a member of parliament after 11 years in jail, has been quoted as saying: "What's wrong if the beauty is presented beautifully, with Indian touch and style?"
Feminists argue that the Hindu rights campaign against the contest owes less to concern about the status of women than to a desire to shut out all the winds of change blowing from the West, especially if they are associated with liberal values.
In some ways, the furore reflects the confusion surrounding the efforts of middle class urban India to redefine itself during a time of rapid change following the introduction of market reforms. For while female literacy and infant mortality rates lag behind sub saharan Africa, it is also a country of tremendous wealth, albeit for a few. That is the reflection that an aspiring middle class naturally wants to see, and the English language media have played up to it.
Although Miss World is new to India, beauty contests are not. As a student, Brinda Karat was crowned Miss Miranda House, the most prestigious women's college of Delhi University, and models were elevated to true Indian heroines two years ago when Aishwarya Rai was declared Miss World and Sushmita Sen took the Miss Universe crown.
In the run up to the contest's grand finale, earnest pieces about the travails of making the crossover from the Indian to the international catwalks have been appearing alongside diet tips from talk show hosts and shopping guides to plastic surgery - and these are in the serious news magazines.
When Amitabh Bachchan announced that he would bring the contest to Bangalore, he congratulated himself for putting India on the world entertainment stage. One martyr later, the sponsors still say the pageant should be viewed with pride. "It should be a showcase for India. The beauty pageant has always given rise to tourism potential. We are putting India on the tourism map," said a spokesman for Bachchan.
He has, however, already been forced to tone down the event, flying contestants to the Seychelles to video the swimsuit competition and hurriedly re marketing the pageant as "a showcase for Indian culture". It has adopted a logo borrowed from a classical Hindu frieze and cajoled the contestants to line up in saris and bindis (the beauty mark Indian women wear on their foreheads), for a photo call last week.
Will that stop others from taking Kumar's path? Nesargi doesn't think so. "This boy has sacrificed himself and many more will come, she promises. "This is only the beginning."
. Miss Ireland, Niamh Redmond, from Drimnagh in Dublin, is a 5/2 favourite to win the contest, bookmakers Paddy Power said yesterday.