This story first appeared in India News Stream
When she presented her credentials in New York to the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres to assume charge as India’s Permanent Representative (PR) to the UN, Ruchira Kamboj cracked the final frontier or glass ceiling of the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), becoming the first woman to ever hold that charge for India.
Deeming it a “privilege to be the first Indian woman to be given the honour to hold this position,” Kamboj had a special message: “To the girls out there, we all can make it!”
Kamboj, who broke another glass ceiling when she served in New Delhi as India’s only woman Chief of Protocol, and as the first woman to head India’s diplomatic Mission in the Kingdom of Bhutan, is very mindful of what exactly her appointment signifies, in terms of gender equality in the elite service.
This stage of gender parity has not exactly come easily to the IFS, despite the fact that the first woman ever to be elected President of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) was an Indian, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, back in 1953. And the fact that India had Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister for over 16 years.
Around the time that Pandit was presiding at the UNGA, Chonira B. Muthamma, India’s first woman IFS officer who had topped the civil service entrance exams and joined the IFS in 1949, had to give a blatantly discriminatory undertaking, along with other women then, that she would quit the service if she got married. While that rule was changed, Muthamma had to seek legal redress against gender discrimination several times; to get a foreign posting, to get a foreign posting as Ambassador and then to get her due promotion to Secretary- rank.
Finally, after decades of struggle, it was in a landmark judgement in 1979 that a three-member Bench of the Supreme Court, headed by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer struck down the discriminatory provisions governing foreign service personnel and upheld Muthamma’s case. In a scathing rebuff to the government, the apex court impressed upon the government of India “the need to overhaul all service rules to remove the stains of sex discrimination, without waiting for ad-hoc inspiration from writ petitions or gender charity.”
Muthamma retired from the IFS in 1982 after 32 years of exemplary service, after breaking South Block’s glass ceiling for all the women who joined the IFS after her. Since then, the IFS has come a long way in changing gender stereotypes.
India has subsequently had many very distinguished woman diplomats, ambassadors and high commissioners who have held charge in countries like the USA, China, Spain, Sri Lanka, Australia, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Qatar, Switzerland, Serbia, Russia, Slovakia and Ghana, among numerous other countries. Three women have served as Foreign Secretary – Chokila Iyer, Nirupama Rao and Sujatha Singh – all of whom have been highly respected for their equanimity, determination and unflappable poise in upholding Indian national interest during their years of distinguished service.
Rao broke another glass ceiling as India’s first foreign office spokesperson and was among the first to embrace the use of social media to disseminate key aspects of foreign policy. India refused to give up her nuclear options at the Conference on Disarmament when Ambassador Arundhati Ghose refused to even countenance the huge pressure from the combined hectoring of the P-5 and other nations to join the discriminatory NPT (nuclear non-proliferation treaty).
Women have held charge in countries of West Asia and in war-torn countries such as Libya, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. In Libya and Lebanon, in fact, the Ambassadors, exemplarily, refused to desert their posts and stayed on with the Indian communities under extremely trying conditions of war and bombings.
Kamboj, who has assumed charge at a time when India is nearing the end of its two-year non-permanent tenure as a member of the UN Security Council, has her work cut out. She is looking forward to a “productive tenure” that will most effectively weave Indian national priorities into the global multilateral framework.