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From eve-teasing to cross-border teasing — the monkeys have been accused of taking people, especially women, for a ride.
The complainants are no other than MLAs. And, it was no monkey business either as the issue came up during the question hour in the Assembly.
Arun Shankar Prasad, the BJP MLA from Khajauli in Madhubani district, said monkeys had made life difficult for women and farmers. He even suggested that the government should bring in langurs to chase away the monkeys.
However, deputy chief minister Sushil Kumar Modi, who is also in charge of the forests department, said: “The langur experiment has not succeeded even in Delhi. The monkeys return after the langur is taken away from the troubled spot,” said Modi.
An unperturbed Prasad came up with another suggestion for Modi. “Why don’t you then catch the monkeys with nets and free them in the jungles in Champaran?” the MLA asked. Thus started a roar with Bhagirathi Devi, the BJP MLA from West Champaran’s Ramnagar, declaring that her area is also not an exception to the monkey anarchy. “Even the food cooked by women are taken away by the monkeys. Please do something, Sir,” she appealed to Modi.
The BJP MLA from Katihar, Binod Singh, also had interesting statistics. “A village in my constituency is regularly raided by 700 monkeys. They even teased the wife of an ex-mukhiya of the village,” he said as his fellow legislators burst into laughter.
Raghvendra Pratap Singh of the RJD jokingly pointed out that the monkey menace was dominant near the India-Nepal border. “Perhaps, the chief minister should get the Union government to talk with its Nepal counterpart to find a solution,” he said.
Modi later told the MLAs that an all-party committee would be set up soon and his department would gather information from other states to know how they were tackling the monkeys.
An RJD MLA wrapped up the discussion with an explicit reference to BJP MLA Jawahar Prasad, who swears himself to be a follower of Lord Hanuman: “Send the monkeys to him; they will obey Jawahar bhai more than anyone else.”
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