Who Is Menaka Guruswamy? India's First Openly Queer MP Takes Oath In Rajya Sabha

Last Updated:April 06, 2026, 20:00 IST

Menaka Guruswamy is a senior advocate of the Supreme Court and one of the leading voices in India’s LGBTQ rights movement.

Senior advocate Menaka Guruswamy on Monday made history by taking oath as a Rajya Sabha MP, becoming India’s first openly queer Member of Parliament.

Guruswamy was nominated by the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress (TMC) along with West Bengal Minister Babul Supriyo, former Bengal DGP Rajeev Kumar, and actor Koel Mallick as candidates for the upper house in February.

Who Is Menaka Guruswamy?

Menaka Guruswamy is a senior advocate of the Supreme Court and one of the leading voices in India’s LGBTQ rights movement. She was among the lawyers who fought the landmark case that led to the decriminalisation of same-sex relations in India after Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was struck down in 2018.

According to an excerpt from “Rising: 30 Women Who Changed India" by Kiran Manral, Guruswamy began her career in 1997 under former Attorney General Ashok Desai, whom she considers her mentor, focusing on litigation and constitutional matters.

She later pursued higher studies at Oxford, completing a BCL, and at Harvard, earning an LLM, before returning to India in 2001 and settling in New Delhi. In 2019, she was named one of the 100 most influential Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine.

Guruswamy has also represented the TMC in court, challenging Enforcement Directorate (ED) raids at the offices of I-PAC, the party’s political consulting agency.

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