Nirupama Indian Foreign Secy

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Nirupama Rao, Indias Ambassador to China, will be its next foreign secretary, the government said on Tuesday.
Rao, who has also been high commissioner in Sri Lanka, takes over the foreign affairs job as relations with neighbour Pakistan are still suffering from the Mumbai attacks that killed 175 people in November. Only the second woman to hold the post, Rao will replace incumbent Shivshankar Menon by the end of July, a government statement said.
India accused Pakistan government agencies of complicity in the Mumbai attack and put on pause a slow-moving peace process with Pakistan, with whom it has gone to war three times and which like India is nuclear-armed.
Indian PM Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari met for the first time since Mumbai on the sidelines of a regional conference in Russia in June, and the countries leaders have agreed to speak again at a July summit. (Rao) is one of the people who dealt with both the region and the big powers, said Siddharth Varadarajan, strategic affairs editor of the Hindu newspaper.
She dealt quite a lot with Indo-Pak relations in the difficult years of 2001-2.