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Parliament can scare away the monkeys, but where should they go?
Everything you can say about India, the opposite is also true. In keeping with this dictum, the Parliament of India outlawed capturing or using protected animals such as langurs in 1972, but continued using langurs to drive away the monkeys that surround the Parliament building itself. At long last Maneka Gandhi got into the act, this January, and made the New Delhi Municipal Corporation give up the practice. The Parliament of India is now using trained men to mimic langurs and scare them away, while also shooting rubber bullets that would stun them.
The metaphor is irresistible: in the way our Parliamentarians sometimes behave, the joke they have reduced the legislative process to, the monkeys represent we the people. Except that the monkeys trouble us too. In not just Delhi but many parts of India, monkeys are so commonplace in urban areas we don’t even find it bizarre. We think of them as other animals in our midst. This was not always the case.
Two years ago, I visited Iqbal Malik, India’s best known primatologist, to understand the roots of the problem. The story begins in the 1920s, when American scientists, Malik told me, first started taking out monkeys from north India for research. The scientists usually wanted monkeys who were neither old nor young, and preferred male monkeys to conduct their experiments. This disrupted monkey families from Delhi to Dehradun. As monkey families were divided and as India began to urbanise, the monkeys came out to the urban areas, where looking for food wasn't as easy as it was back in the forest.
Newly independent India, a poor country badly in need of foreign exchange, was happy to export monkeys to the United States. At its peak, as many as 50,000 monkeys a year. That is how much we disrupted the monkey ecology. Eventually, this stopped not because we were concerned about ecology, but because of Lord Hanuman. While animal rights activists in the United States had been protesting the use of Indian monkeys, prime minister Morarji Desai was being moved by religious groups in India. The Americans had promised they won't use the monkeys for defence research, but they were found violating the promise. American scientists used Indian Rhesus macaques for decades to test everything from the functioning of the brain to cosmetics. The monkeys often died.
The Americans aren’t to be blamed alone, of course. The reason why there’s such a dearth of monkey catchers in India is also religious. How could anybody be catching and imprisoning Lord Hanuman? For some years after 1947 central Delhi did not have a monkey catcher because the lone monkey catcher, a Muslim, went away to Pakistan.
In the late '80s and early '90s, rapid urbanisation meant that the monkey menace exploded. It wasn't that monkeys had invaded Delhi, but Delhi was cutting down the greens and invading their habitat. The problem was worsened because custom says that Lord Hanuman is welcomed with bananas. People did this when the monkeys came home, only realising later that monkeys could be aggressive, dangerous, powerful, and that they bite! They also steal, from your terrace and even from your hands. A deputy mayor of Delhi once died because he fell from his terrace while warding off a monkey. Monkeys have invaded the Delhi metro and the defence ministry alike.
Missing the woods for the trees
Why can't Delhi solve its monkey problem? Delhi has tried everything but, Iqbal Malik says, unscientifically. The way they catch monkeys, the way they trap them, the way they release them, making it possible for them to return. There's also been some great Indian corruption: the monkey catchers get paid per monkey, so it is in their interest that the monkeys return. And of course contractors are hired to go find monkey catchers from the lowest castes in Rajasthan and other states.
The main problem with these methods of scaring away monkeys, whether it is done through langurs or men mimicking langurs, is that this makes the monkeys even more aggressive and violent. You can drive them away from Parliament and the offices of central Delhi, from Delhi as a whole, perhaps, if you employ enough manpower to scare them away. Yet you can't wish them away, they will return. A nuclear armed republic with the world's second largest population can't have this passive aggressive relationship with the monkeys whose forests it destroyed to make cities.
The monkey menace reached its peak in 2007, and as a result the Delhi High Court got into the act. It was found that civic agencies were capturing monkeys and keeping them in cages in the heat because they didn't know what to do with them. The court asked them to be sent to the Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary in Madhya Pradesh, and although the Madhya Pradesh government was given money to take away our monkeys, they came back pleading that they can't do this. The monkeys were disrupting the ecological balance of the sanctuary. Other states too refused to take Delhi's monkeys. That question remains moot. The mimic men will satisfy Maneka Gandhi, but where on earth will Parliament's monkeys go?
A wildlife sanctuary for Delhi's monkeys
Isn't there a wildlife sanctuary in Delhi, the Delhi High court then wondered. Thus Delhi's monkeys were settled in the Asola-Bhati wildlife sanctuary. It's in one end of Chattarpur, that corner of south Delhi near Mehrauli which today is more famous for its wedding venue farmhouses than for the Chattarpur temple complex. Keep driving inside Chattarpur and you will find a temple of – you guessed it – Lord Hanuman. You will begin seeing monkeys. Keep driving and you will see a dead end, called Bhati mines. Huge green sheets and a gate that's often open. Hordes of monkeys. Emergency-era resettled slum dwellers and a whole settlement of Pakistani Hindu refugees, all complaining about monkey bites.
The Delhi government's wildlife department will not permit you to go inside, even if, or perhaps especially if you are a journalist. You discover you don't have to go inside. The monkeys are not only coming out of the gate, they have climbed those green sheets and are trying to bring them down. When you see the monkeys trying to break down the walls of the Asola Bhati wildlife sanctuary, the image will stay with you forever. We've given them a life sentence, no bail, no parole, no visitors allowed.
The sanctuary idea can work, but the Delhi wildlife department and its chosen non-profits together did what they liked. Iqbal Malik gave them a plan, detailed up to the last tree that should be planted. "They didn't listen to me and you can see the monkeys keep getting out." Food is brought from outside every day, and it has to be admitted that this has reduced the monkey menace in Delhi since the peak levels of 2007. Yet they are still all over the place. Some years ago they destroyed a few dozen plants in a lovely barsati I used to live in. That's why I knocked on Iqbal Malik's door. I wanted to know why these monkeys were doing this to me. Her answers made me stop cursing them.
The New Delhi Municipal Corporation now pays Rs 1.2 lakh per month to the Delhi wildlife department to distribute food to the monkeys in the north Delhi ridge, so that they stay there. That’s a lesson learnt after over six decades of fighting with monkeys. Yet if the Parliament of India and the city of Delhi want to solve their monkey problem, the authorities should go to Iqbal Malik. They won't. Malik fell out with Maneka Gandhi at some point.
While researching the story I wrote two years ago, I called up Maneka Gandhi. While framing my question before her, I made the mistake of using the phrase “monkey problem”, even though by now I had become sympathetic towards monkeys, thanks to Iqbal Malik. Gandhi said that I had already decided that monkeys were a problem so she won’t waste her time on me, and disconnected the phone. I called her back, and explained that I wanted to understand what she had to say. “No,” she replied, “I think you have already made up your mind”.
(Delhi's monkey business has made great copy for journalists since 1950. For foreign correspondents in India, it is a must-do exotic story. Samples of Indian monkey journalism in the foreign press can be read on the blog, The Monkey Inspector's Report.)
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