Unfair and lovely! Kerala chief secy shines a light on colourism

‘When you are a dark-skinned woman, you are invisible,’’ wrote Sarada Muraleedharan on Facebook. Her post, which hit the headlines recently, talked about how an unnamed visitor to her office commented that her stewardship as Kerala’s chief secretary was “as black” as her husband’s “was white”.

Sarada succeeded her husband V Venu after he retired. Interestingly, this was the first time since the formation of the state in 1956 that an IAS couple had become chief secretaries in an unbroken sequence. Given this, it’s awful to even think about the toxicity of the comment.