The All India Trinamool Congress has fielded Senior Advocate Menaka Guruswamy as one of its candidates for the upcoming Rajya Sabha elections from West Bengal. If elected, she would make history as India’s first openly queer Member of Parliament.
Who is Senior Advocate Menaka Guruswamy?
Guruswamy is a Senior Advocate of the Supreme Court of India, widely recognised as one of the country’s finest constitutional lawyers. She is best known for being part of the legal team that argued the landmark case leading to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in India. In 2018, the Supreme Court read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, a colonial-era law that had criminalised same-sex relationships. That verdict was a watershed moment for LGBTQ rights in India, and Guruswamy played a central role in securing it.
Academic background
Guruswamy joined the bar in 1997 and began her career working with Ashok Desai, who was then the Attorney General of India. She is a Rhodes Scholar who earned her doctorate from Oxford University and also holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School as a Gammon Fellow. She has served as visiting faculty at some of the world’s top law schools, including Yale, Columbia, and NYU.
Internationally recognised
In 2019, TIME magazine named Guruswamy one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World. She was featured alongside her partner and fellow lawyer Arundhati Katju, with whom she has shared both her personal and professional journey publicly.
Her family background
Guruswamy is the daughter of Mohan Guruswamy, a former BJP strategist who once served as a special advisor to former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha, and Meera Guruswamy.
Why TMC picked her
Guruswamy has been appearing in several high-profile cases on behalf of the West Bengal government and the TMC, including matters related to the Supreme Court’s Special Intensive Revision exercise and the IPAC-ED raid cases. Her nomination is widely seen as recognition of her legal work for the party, while also allowing TMC to signal its commitment to diversity and inclusion by fielding a candidate from the LGBTQ community.
What happens next
Five Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal are falling vacant in 2026. With a comfortable majority in the 294-member state assembly, the TMC is expected to win four of those seats comfortably. The Election Commission has announced that polling for 37 Rajya Sabha seats across multiple states, including West Bengal, will be held on March 16.
If Guruswamy wins, she will not just be a lawmaker. She will be a symbol of how far India’s conversation around LGBTQ rights has come since the days she stood in a courtroom fighting to change the law itself.
Bureau Report
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