Two IPS women officers have come to public notice this week, for reasons that are not flattering to the governments concerned. Kiran Bedi, who applied for pre-mature retirement, is high-profile and is known not only in India but also abroad. She has won the Magsaysay Award and recognition from a public starved of the kind of service expected from public servants.Marie-Lou Fernandes is not known except to a few people in Mumbai and some districts of Maharashtra, where she served in the past. We are told that she applied for study leave abroad and, without waiting for the authorities, to sanction her request proceeded to do a course in Chicago.

I know both Kiran and Marie-Lou. They are totally honest, committed to the people they serve and meticulous in conduct. Unfortunately, they were inconvenient or uncomfortable in a system that does not appreciate qualities of head and heart but, on the contrary, encourages sycophancy and blind, unprincipled conformism.

Like Marie-Lou, Kiran also quit her place of duty, in fact, on more than one occasion without waiting for official approval —once in Goa and then in Mizoram. The compulsion of her daughter’s education prompted her to dare, a word I have borrowed from her own book, I Dare. Wherever she has served she has made a mark, albeit in a very distinctive manner which has been frowned upon by her colleagues and politicians.

Marie-Lou gave no such provocation. But she was a rebel in a sense, as she could not stomach the shenanigans of those among her colleagues and, more importantly, her superiors, who kowtowed to politicians in order to feather their own nests or further their careers. Yet, when the government faced criticism after a hooch tragedy in Mumbai’s eastern suburbs, Marie-Lou was sent to repair the damage.

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