Senior Advocate Menaka Guruswamy was on Monday elected as a member of the Rajya Sabha from the State of West Bengal. Menaka Guruswamy becomes India's first openly queer Rajya Sabha MP from West Bengal, known for her role in striking down Section 377.
Her journey includes defending the RSS and the West Bengal government in controversial cases, raising complex questions about her future role. Will she now champion queer rights in Parliament as she did in the courts? Guruswamy was fielded by the Trinamool Congress Party and was elected unopposed.
Menaka Guruswamy is now India’s first openly queer member of Parliament from the state of West Bengal. The internet celebrated as the 51-year-old lawyer was elected to the Rajya Sabha on 9 March, fielded by the Trinamool Congress (TMC).
Guruswamy is the woman who had helped strike down Section 377 that had criminalised homosexuality since 1861 and will now be entering Parliament that had failed, in the last six years since, to construct anything on the ground that that verdict had cleared.
In July 2018, Guruswamy stood before a five-judge constitutional bench and asked, on behalf of IIT students and graduates who were gay, “How strongly must we love, knowing we are unconvicted felons under Section 377? My Lords, this is love that must be constitutionally recognised, and not just sexual acts.”
Equipped with degrees and fellowships from world-class educational institutions such as Oxford and Harvard, she battled the case with the help of a team of senior lawyers, including another prominent lawyer named Arundhati Katju. Both of them came out as a couple shortly after this verdict was delivered.
Besides Guruswamy, TMC candidates Babul Supriyo, Rajeev Kumar, and Koel Mallick and BJP candidate Rahul Sinha were also elected to the Rajya Sabha on March 9.All of them were elected unopposed. Pertinently, Guruswamy recently appeared for the TMC in proceedings challenging the Enforcement Directorate’s searches at the premises of I-PAC.
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