Monkeys in the Middle

By James Lochart
The Oct. 20 death of Delhi Deputy Mayor S. S. Bajwa, who died from a fall he took while trying to scare a troop of rhesus macaques off the balcony of his home, brought to the world's attention a growing problem in India's cities: how to make sure the country's various primate species live in harmony with the dominant one--Homo sapiens. Recently, Delhi's rhesus macaques have been getting up to all sorts of, well, monkey business, tossing around top-secret documents at the defense ministry, pursuing commuters right onto the cars of the city's new subway system, even invading hospitals and yanking IVs out of patients' arms so they can suck up the glucose. But dealing with the problem is tricky: the simians are sacred to Hindus; the cute but deceptively dangerous critters are representations of the monkey god Haruman. As India's metropolises expand, the monkeys' natural habitat has been squeezed, resulting in ever more confrontations between man and monkey. But animal-rights advocates have been critical of efforts to combat the problem--leading some local bigwigs, who live in the primates' path, to bring in bigger monkeys in hopes of scaring off the smaller fry. A portrait of a simian siege.