Menaka Guruswamy

Dr. Menaka Guruswamy (born 27 November 1974) is an Indian lawyer and politician. Since 2026, she has served as a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, representing West Bengal. Guruswamy is also a senior advocate at the Supreme Court of India and was the B.R. Ambedkar Research Scholar and lecturer at Columbia Law School, New York, from 2017 to 2019. Guruswamy has also been visiting faculty at Yale Law School, New York University School of Law and University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is known for having played a significant role in many landmark cases before the Supreme Court, including the Section 377 case, the bureaucratic reforms case, the Augusta Westland bribery case, the Salwa Judum case, and the Right to Education case. She is assisting the Supreme Court as Amicus Curie in the case pertaining to the alleged extrajudicial killings of 1,528 persons in Manipur by members of the military and the security forces .

Guruswamy has advised the United Nations Development Fund, New York and United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), New York and UNICEF South Sudan on various aspects of International Human Rights Law and has also supported the constitution-making process in Nepal. A member of the Trinamool Congress, she is the first openly LGBTQ+ parliamentarian at the national level in India's history.