New Delhi, June 19: National Commission for Women chairperson Lalitha Kumaramangalam has told the Prime Minister's Office she would not accept "friends or family"- a euphemism for political appointees - as panel members.

Ruling parties have historically used the commission to park their eminent women members. Kumaramangalam, appointed last September, is herself seen as a political appointee, having earlier been a BJP spokesperson and a member of the party's national executive, although she has strong credentials as a women's activist too.

Her stand comes at a time the commission, which receives about 240 complaints a day, is left with just one member apart from her, with the rest having completed their three-year terms one by one from August last year.

"I have conveyed to the PMO that no friends or family would be acceptable," she told The Telegraph today.

"We need people with professional expertise in fields like medicine, culture, law and women's issues."

Kumaramangalam said the commission was "not a kitty party" and that people with a political background would be welcome only if they had a body of work dealing with women's issues.

Women and child development minister Maneka Gandhi, who oversees the commission's functioning, had started her tenure by announcing she wouldn't tolerate "merely political appointments". But her suggestion of a law requiring women's panel members to be lawyers with 10 years' experience was rejected.

Kumaramangalam's appointment ran counter to Maneka's ideas but the two women may now find themselves allies.

Sources said both women had recommended several candidates as commission members to the PMO but it has sat on these for months. During this time, the government has made a series of controversial political appointments to various bodies, such as FTII Pune and the Indian Council of Historical Research.

Most women's panel heads too have been political appointees: Congress governments picked party member Mamta Sharma, former President V.V. Giri's daughter Mohini Giri, and party MPs Jayanti Patnaik and Girija Vyas; the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government appointed BJP member Poornima Advani.

The only panel chief without known political affiliation was academic Vidya Parthasarthy, selected by the Vajpayee government in 1999. Most panel members too have had political connections.

"There will be political pressure but my party and I will have to deal with it," Kumaramangalam said.

Kumaramangalam runs the Chennai-based NGO Prakriti, which works with the transgender community and HIV-infected people. She twice contested Lok Sabha elections unsuccessfully, in 2004 and 2009.

Her grandfather P. Subbarayan, former chief minister of Madras Presidency, was in the Justice Party and then in the Congress; her father Mohan Kumaramangalam, a communist ideologue, had later joined the Congress and brother Rangarajan Kumaramangalam left the Congress for the BJP before his death in 2000.