K. Rukmini Menon

New Delhi, Jan. 3: They’ve lost their top two, but they are 129 rich and going places where no woman has gone before.

Time took away India’s pioneering foreign service women in the latter half of last year — C.B. Muthamma and K. Rukmini Menon, the first and the second women of the IFS — but they’ve left a legacy of leading ladies peppered across the frontlines of foreign policy.

Not least among them is foreign secretary Nirupama Rao who says the likes of Muthamma and Menon were “role models for all junior IFS officers, particularly the lady officers”.

Menon, along with Muthamma, had all their careers chipped away at making the foreign service less of a male preserve. Today, there are 129 of them — an unprecedented 21 per cent of all IFS officers.

In fact, 2009 has been a watershed year. India got its first full-term woman foreign secretary in Nirupama Rao. There had been Chokila Iyer in December 2000, but that was for barely a month, more a ceremonial first than a real one.

“But it isn’t just the foreign secretary. Look at the number of women in key positions,” says an official in the ministry of external affairs, referring to the many missions abroad and key South Block desks that are headed by women.

Meera Shankar is India’s ambassador to the US. Sujatha Singh is the high commissioner to Australia. Bhaswati Mukherjee is ambassador/PR to Unesco. Riva Ganguly Das is India’s consul general in Shanghai. Primrose Sharma heads the Indian mission in Lisbon. Chitra Narayanan is ambassador to Switzerland, and Mitra Vashisht is ambassador to Cuba. Vijayalatha Reddy is mission head in Thailand, Ruchi Ghanshyam in Ghana and Lavanya Prasad in Cyprus.

Back home, Latha Reddy is secretary (east) and Parbati Sen Vyas is secretary (European region). In addition, women have come to hold additional secretary and joint secretary posts in never-before numbers.

In 2001, the present foreign secretary had contributed her bit. Rao took over as the officer in-charge of the MEA’s interface with the media, forcing journalists to use the gender neutral “spokesperson” to describe her than the usual spokesman.

The march to the top has not come easy. Women officers -- as in the case of Menon and Muthamma -- would invariably find themselves posted as ambassadors in Africa or other missions considered less significant or hard postings.

Muthamma was not somebody to accept the discrimination quietly. She moved court when in the late 1970s, she was told that she cannot be promoted to the secretary grade for she was not meritorious enough.

Service rules Muthamma challenged included: women officer should take permission in writing of the government before marriage, a woman officer may be asked to resign if the government feels her marital responsibilities hamper her duties and no married woman shall be entitled as of right to be appointed to the service.

A bench headed by V.R. Krishna Iyer heard the case. The government gave in, stating that Muthamma had been empanelled. The bench castigated the government for the discriminatory rules and naked bias. Since Muthamma had been empanelled, the bench dismissed the case. “We dismiss the petition but not the problem,” stated the court.

The MEA’s website, however, is yet to awake to the fact of women coming to the fore in the service. “The present cadre strength of the service stands at approximately 600 officers manning around 162 Indian missions and posts abroad and the various posts in the ministry at home,” states the website. There is probably a case to use a more suitable word.