Our political and thought leaders talk about saving the planet but can’t save citizens from marauding monkeys
Our politicians love grandiloquence, especially on grand, esoteric subjects like climate change and sustainable development goals. Such subjects offer them opportunities to embark on flights of fancy and indulge in humbug. This helps them look and sound good; this also diverts people’s attention from the elephant in the room—or the monkey on the balcony.
Consider the supreme irony: India, the world’s largest democracy, is the fastest-growing major economy; it is able to spend Rs 13.5 lakh crore on infrastructure development; it has been able to resist Pakistan’s jihadist ventures; it has the gumption to take on the much stronger China by joining hands with the US, Japan, and Australia (Quad); it is a globally recognized IT power which is also making advances in latest technologies; it was able to supply personal protective equipment and vaccines to the entire world during the worst phases of the Covid pandemic.
But it cannot handle the monkey menace.
Not in the North and South Blocks and other buildings which house the most powerful Union ministries, not in the Supreme Court and the High Court, not in or around the residences of the country’s most powerful men and women, and certainly not where the lesser mortals live and work.
The monkey menace continues to grow because of three reasons. First and foremost is our political masters’ penchant for claptrap, freebies, and sentimentalism. They are convinced that rant and cant, along with fantastic promises, have greater vote-catching potential than good governance. So, why bother about something as tedious as, say, administrative and police reforms when populist promises (however outlandish) can help them enter high office? Why do something substantive to make the environment better and the surroundings of common people safe from wild animals when grandstanding on nebulous and arcane notions like climate change and carbon footprints suffice?
One of the institutions that the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change consulted to amend the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972, was the True Conservation Alliance Foundation. In its submission, the foundation said, “India is perhaps the only country on earth where farmers are prevented and inhibited from protecting their crops, livelihoods, and property as per the stipulations of the Wildlife Protection Act 1972 that has put in place procedures for crop pest management that are illogical, unsustainable, and practically impossible or near impossible for a farmer to use to protect his livelihood.”
Further, “it is illegal for a farmer to even chase a wild boar, nilgai or monkey off his land, let alone shoot it, even if it is destroying his crops and livelihood or posing a threat to his life and livestock.” The plight of city dwellers has been little better than that of farmers. And the powers that be have done nothing to improve the situation.
Even if anything good has been done for people in the Wild Life (Protection, Amendment Act, 2022, it is yet to translate into action.
But why blame only political leaders? This brings us to the second reason: India’s thought leaders. Always the first to import postmodern pathologies from glamorous Western universities, they too are more interested in saving the planet than their immediate surroundings. Carbon footprints are sexy; cleaning the Yamuna is not. And banishing monkeys from human habitats is not just unsexy but also, as we shall see, downright blasphemous in the salons where intellectuals lord over.
In short, our political and thought leaders are focused on baloney, events, and posturing. The sharper their focus, the greater the degradation of the environment. The cacophony on saving the earth, climate change, etc., is directly proportional to the rise in the air quality index (AQI) in cities, the toxicity of rivers, the growth of slums and unauthorized colonies, and the ecological degradation of cities and villages.
The third factor that has transformed the national capital, its satellite towns, and many other parts of the country into the playgrounds of monkeys is animal rights activists; in common parlance, they are referred to as just activists. They have appointed themselves as the saviours of animals whose rights must be protected at any cost—even the human cost. Not a day passes when there is not a report of an attack by monkeys.
The Government stated in Parliament long ago that over 1,900 cases of monkey bites were in 2015—that is, almost five persons get bitten every day. Monkeys have even killed men, women, and children. But when it comes to action against monkeys, activists gang up and stall that. A few years ago, the government decided to arrange for catching monkeys and shifting to the forests identified for the purpose.
Activists torpedoed the project. They offer specious arguments; for example, they blame humans, not monkeys, as being intruders. Monkeys are coming back to their habitats, so there is nothing wrong about it—so goes the argument. This line of thinking is the product and function of the fancy postmodern, anti-humanism theories that infest Western academia, but that’s another story.
It is astonishing that few, if any, in the political class have countered this pompous hoax: we, humans, have also intruded into the habitats of lions and tigers, cobras and pythons, so should these animals also be allowed to roam freely in our cities and towns?
A news portal recently quoted a member of an official expert committee as saying, “The activists are self-proclaimed experts who don’t have any scientific knowledge on the subject, but they create a ruckus. They take photos of animal catchers and file frivolous complaints of cruelty against them. So, the catchers don’t come. The same kind of pressure is built on the [government] agencies which want to sterilise the monkeys, so they don’t participate in the bidding process.”
Unsurprisingly, the tyranny of activists continues and people suffer.
Monkeys have been terrorizing Delhi-National Capital Region for decades. In 2007 October, a monkey attacked Surinder Singh Bajwa, deputy mayor, resulting in his fall to death. In that year, the Delhi High Court, responding to a case filed by the New Friends Colony Residents Welfare Association, ordered a ban on feeding monkeys. The three municipal corporations were authorised to find the violators.
A lot of solutions have been suggested, government committees constituted, and court judgments passed—to no avail. The main reason is that those who matter, politicians and bureaucrats, have been apathetic to the plight of common people—in fact, even to their own plight. Monkeys, as we mentioned earlier, terrorise even North Block and South Block.
It is a case of systemic entropy. It manifests in various ways. We cannot tackle black swan events, so oxygen and medical facilities couldn’t be provided during the devastating Delta wave of Covid-19. We cannot handle grey rhinos, so deadly smog engulfs north India with the onset of every winter.
We cannot even handle monkeys.
(The writer is Resident Editor, The Pioneer, Delhi. He is the author of There Is No Such Thing As Hate Speech, Bloomsbury, 2017)
