A Liberal Emblem

Menaka Guruswamy’s likely entry into Parliament will make history, but it also exposes the curious theatre of liberalism in West Bengal’s ruling party.

When India’s Parliament next convenes its Upper House, it is likely to witness a historic first. Menaka Guruswamy, a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, is poised to become the country’s first openly lesbian Member of Parliament. Her path to the Rajya Sabha comes through nomination by the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), the ruling party of West Bengal led by Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, whose comfortable majority in the State Assembly means her victory is all but assured.

Potent symbolism is at play here. For decades, queer Indians were criminalised under Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, the colonial-era law that outlawed same-sex relations. In 2018 the Supreme Court of India struck down the offending provisions in a landmark judgment. Among the lawyers arguing that case were Guruswamy and her partner, Arundhati Katju, who framed their arguments around dignity, privacy and constitutional equality. The verdict marked one of the most consequential expansions of civil liberties in modern India.

Guruswamy’s legal pedigree is formidable. Educated at the National Law School of India University, the University of Oxford and Harvard Law School, she has spent decades litigating constitutional questions and civil-rights disputes. Her courtroom work and academic writing have earned international recognition; in 2019 she appeared on Time magazine’s list of the world’s hundred most influential people and on Forbes India’s roster of trailblazing women. In India’s tightly knit legal circles, she is widely regarded as an advocate who relishes complex constitutional battles.

Yet her nomination is about more than legal brilliance. It is also about optics. Mamata Banerjee TMC has long cultivated an image of progressive pluralism. Elevating a globally recognised, openly lesbian constitutional lawyer allows the party to burnish that image further.

But for all its claims to enlightened liberalism, the political ecosystem over which the TMC presides has recently been associated with episodes that sit uneasily with such branding. The Sandeshkhali disgrace where women from several villages suffered at the hands of local TMC strongmen in a regime of intimidation, extortion and sexual coercion revealed to the hilt the dark underside of West Bengal’s political machinery.

If Sandeshkhali ripped the façade of the TMC’s rural governance, the horror that unfolded months later at R. G. Kar Medical College and Hospital in Kolkata shook the state’s – and India’s - urban conscience after the body of a young trainee doctor was discovered inside the hospital premises after she had been brutally raped and murdered while on duty. The crime, committed within one of the city’s most prominent medical institutions, provoked nationwide outrage.

Since then, Sandeshkhali and the R. G. Kar Medical College case have become reference points in the national conversation about the abysmal standards of governance in Banerjee’s state.

Thet have complicated the narrative of a government eager to present itself as the custodian of ‘progressive’ values. While the TMC speaks fluently in the language of inclusivity when it comes to minority communities, its local networks of patronage and muscle that underpin its electoral machine thrive with impunity. In such a landscape, the elevation of a high-profile liberal icon can appear less like systemic reform than reputational varnish.

None of this diminishes Guruswamy’s personal achievement. Though one might question why she chose a party that has had such a dismal record on women’s rights. That said, the very fact that a major party feels comfortable nominating an openly lesbian figure to Parliament reflects the distance the country has travelled since the days when Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code lurked in the statute book. India’s Parliament, despite its scale and diversity, has rarely included openly LGBTQ politicians. Guruswamy’s presence will therefore mark a symbolic widening of the democratic tent.

But symbolism can cut two ways. For admirers, her nomination signals that India’s politics is slowly accommodating new forms of identity and representation. For sceptics, it illustrates how adept political parties have become at borrowing the language of liberalism while presiding over systems that often remain stubbornly illiberal.

Either way, Guruswamy is about to enter a chamber not known for understatement. Her career has been spent invoking constitutional ideals of equality, fraternity and non-discrimination. The test of her parliamentary tenure may lie not merely in representing those ideals, but in navigating the contradictions of the political machinery that has brought her there.