India says ambassador to China new foreign secretary

NEW DELHI (Reuters) - Nirupama Rao, India's 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.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Pakistan 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."

An attack on the parliament in 2001, blamed on Pakistan-based Kashmiri separatists, brought the countries to the brink of a full-blown conflict.

Rao also takes over at a time when India has enjoyed some of its best ever relations with the United States, marked by the signing of a lucrative civilian nuclear deal in 2008, but is still testing whether President Barack Obama's administration matches its predecessor's perceived pro-India stance.

Trade between India and China has grown under Rao's watch and China is now India's biggest trade partner in Asia, despite a simmering border dispute.