Roohi Khan

Mumbai, Aug. 8: The tall deputy CEO in full-sleeved salwar-kameez looks up from her BlackBerry and speaks to a member of her all-male staff.

So what, you may ask. Nothing, except that this is the Central Haj Committee office in Mumbai, where such a scene had never been seen even three months ago.

Which is why a twinkle appears in Roohi Khan’s eyes as she discusses the media coverage of Pakistan foreign minister Hina Rabbani Khar’s trip to India recently.

The 39-year-old Khan would be the first to dismiss any unwarranted comparison but still, Pakistan’s first woman foreign minister isn’t the only Muslim woman breaking glass ceilings in these parts.

A small coincidence: the Central Haj Committee, which manages the annual pilgrimage by Indians, operates under India’s foreign ministry.

When the Bhopal-born Khan, a 1998-batch Madhya Pradesh civil servant, became the first woman to be appointed to an administrative post at the Haj Committee on May 11, conservatives had raised objections. The Mumbai-headquartered Sunni group, Raza Academy, sent a protest letter to the state government and also approached the media, but the administration stood firmly behind her.

The committee’s chairperson is a woman, Mohsina Kidwai, but hers is a political appointment. As the first woman to hold a bureaucratic post in the committee, Khan now has her hands full supervising the pilgrims’ lists, travel arrangements, visas and immigration issues and communicating with private tour operators and aggrieved Haj applicants who have missed out.

Khan is no stranger to setting trends, though: she says she was the first Muslim woman to get through the Madhya Pradesh state administrative exams.

Today, as the committee’s deputy chief executive officer lets her work speak for herself and her gender, she is receiving invites from schools and colleges to advise girl students. “Islam is a progressive religion and I tell them that one can balance one’s career and religion,” she says.

Khan says her father, a journalist who started a newspaper in Bhopal, Urdu Action, has always supported her in her decisions. He inspired her to appear for the civil services exam after she had graduated in law from Bhopal and did a postgraduate diploma in management from Faridabad.

She worked as Bhopal deputy collector and later as a deputy commissioner with a rural job scheme council in the same city. Then she applied for the Haj committee job.

Choosing not to comment on Raza Academy’s objections, Khan said she was selected on merit. “Applications were accepted (by the foreign ministry) for this post and interviews were taken. The whole process was conducted in a democratic way.”

Now Khan and her boss, CEO Shakir Hussain, are working on administrative reforms in the committee.

Hussain, an Indian Revenue Service officer who assumed office a year ago, has already made the Haj application process less cumbersome by introducing one form instead of two. He has ensured that information on accommodation and flight schedules is regularly posted on the committee website along with a waiting list.

“The number of applications we receive is over 3 lakh and the quota given to us is limited (it was 1.6 lakh this year). This leads to a lot of disgruntled pilgrims waiting for years to get through. We hope to bring about greater transparency to make the system fair for all pilgrims,” Hussain said.

He and Khan are trying to create a database on pilgrims to prevent “repeaters” who cheat the system by going more than once. They hope a biometric system proposed by the Saudi embassy will be in place by next year.