India may soon have its first openly queer MP

When Menaka Guruswamy walks into Parliament House to contest the House of Commons elections in mid-March, she may become the first openly queer person on the ballot. It has been a long journey from the Supreme Court judgment decriminalizing Section 377 in September 2018 to getting a seat in the House of Lords. The Trinamool Congress nominated her as its candidate for the Lok Sabha.Perhaps realizing the significance of the moment, Guruswamy posted onGuruswamy opened up about her relationship with fellow lawyer Arundhati Katju. In 2023, former diplomat Vivek Katju wrote a personal essay on the process of coming to terms with his daughter Arundhati and her partner, expressing his initial shock and despair when he discovered her sexuality.Guruswamy is the daughter of public policy analyst Mohan Guruswamy, who served as an adviser to the finance minister in the Vajpayee government. She started her career in 1997 under former Attorney General Ashok Desai.The nomination also prompted a backlash. Union MoS Sukanta Majumdar said Guruswamy’s nomination was “retaliation” to Banerjee’s case.Guruswamy was included in Foreign Policy magazine’s 2019 list of the 100 most influential global thinkers, along with Arundhati Katju. In 2017, her portrait was unveiled at Rhodes House, Oxford University.Guruswamy studied at Oxford University, Harvard Law School and the National Law School of India. She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and a Gammon Fellow at Harvard University. She has visited faculty at Yale Law School, New York University Law School, and the University of Toronto Law School. From 2017 to 2019, she served as a BR Ambedkar Research Scholar and Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School, where she taught constitutional design in post-conflict democracies.