The senior-most bureaucrat in India’s most gender-equal state had something to say to an unnamed commenter, who compared her tenure “as black as her husband’s was white”—a reference to her skin colour. Even if the inane comment was meant as a ‘joke’, Sarada Muraleedharan was not going to take it quietly.

“High time for me not to feel defensive about either the fact that I am a woman or that I am dark,” the Kerala chief secretary wrote in a Facebook post that was initially deleted, but then restored because “there were things there that needed to be discussed.”

Muraleedharan took over as Kerala chief secretary in September 2024 after her predecessor V Venu, a fellow 1990-batch IAS officer (coincidentally, also her husband), retired.

She is the first woman to hold the top bureaucratic job in a state that does well on most gender indices, notably sex ratio (#1 at 1,084 females for every 1,000 males in 2011). Her own career has been nothing short of impressive: head of Kudumbashree, the state government mission to reduce poverty and empower women, from 2006 to 2012; chief operating officer at the National Rural Livelihoods Mission at the ministry of rural........

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