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Veena Sikri
Veena Sikri is a retired Indian diplomat, academic, and former High Commissioner of India to Bangladesh,[1][2] a role that she is the only woman to have performed.[3] She is a professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in New Delhi.[3] Early lifeSikri graduated from St. Mary's School, Pune in 1963.[4] She completed her bachelor's degree in statistics from the University of Pune in 1967.[4] She completed her masters of economics from Delhi University in 1970.[4] CareerSikri joined the Indian Foreign Service in 1971.[5] From 1977 to 1981, she was stationed at the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations.[5] From 1989 to 1992, Sikri was the Director General of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.[5] Sikri was the consul general of India in Hong Kong from 1996 to 2000.[5] From 2000 to 2003, Sikri was the High Commissioner of India to Malaysia.[5] She was appointed the High Commissioner of India to Bangladesh in 2003.[5] She resigned from the Indian Foreign Service on 26 September 2006 after her junior Shiv Shankar Menon was appointed Foreign Secretary of India by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.[6] Her husband Rajiv Sikri. also an officer of the same batch as her, resigned from the Indian Foreign Service for the same reason earlier.[6][7][8] From 2008 to 2011, Sikri was a visiting researcher at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies based in Singapore.[5] She is the Vice Chairperson of the India chapter of the South Asia Foundation.[5] She co-edited Contemporarising Tagore and the World with Muchkund Dubey and Imtiaz Ahmed.[5] Sikri is the chairperson of the Bangladesh Studies program at the Academy of International Studies of Jamia Millia Islamia and endowed by the Ford Foundation.[9] She is the convenor of South Asia Women Network.[6] In 2014, she credited Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina for removing terrorism from Bangladesh and called for out of the box thinking for removing problems between India and Bangladesh.[10] In January 2024, Sikri said Bangladesh Nationalist Party boycotting the general election would not harm the legitimacy of the election.[11][12] She appreciated the Indian government maintaining a neutral position during the 2024 Quota reform movement in Bangladesh.[13] Personal lifeSikri's husband, Rajiv Sikri, was also a diplomat of India.[4] References
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