‘Poor swines got flu from us humans’

It is not only her son Varun Gandhi’s security Maneka Gandhi is agitated about these days. Pigs have also been occupying her thoughts. According to the Bharatiya Janata Party member of Parliament, the inalienable “human rights” of pigs have come under threat because of the recent onset of swine flu. In a recent speech in Parliament, Maneka batted for animal rights and objected to the poor pig being blamed for swine flu.

Maneka argued that it was the poor swine which had caught the infection from humans and not the other way round. “It is because the virus is supposed to have originated in 1918 at a pig fair where humans and pigs got sick together. It later emerged, as it has now, that pigs catch the flu from humans and not humans from pigs. That is the only relationship it has with that poor animal,” she said.