The unruly monkeys of Delhi have been accused of killing a deputy mayor, who died of head injuries in hospital yesterday after falling from the first-floor terrace of his home.

S. S. Baiwa, 52, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), fell while reading a newspaper on the terrace at about 7am on Saturday, according to his family. They said that they thought he had been attacked by monkeys and lost his balance while trying to chase them away. “Otherwise, there was no reason for a man sitting in his chair to fall,” Pawan Bhaskar, his personal assistant, said.

Baiwa’s house is near a temple dedicated to Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, where hundreds of monkeys gather every day to be fed offerings by devotees. Their alleged role in his death has reignited a debate about how to handle the Delhi population of rhesus macaques, which experts now estimate at more than 5,500.

The 14 million human residents of the capital have long tolerated the monkeys, whose natural habitat is the surrounding forest, and many revere and feed them, believing them to be incarnations of Hanuman.

As forested areas in Delhi shrink, however, the monkeys are becoming increasingly aggressive.

Last month a monkey almost brought Delhi airport to a standstill after it entered the security checking area through a gap in the roof.

In 2004 monkeys broke into the Ministry of Defence and tore up secret documents. In the same year the Supreme Court ordered that monkeys should be driven out of Delhi and local authorities started rounding up the macaques. First they sent them to monkey “prisons” on the outskirts of Delhi but animal rights activists complained. Then they sent hundreds to nearby states, where they were released into the forest. But several states have refused to accept more because they say that the “urban” monkeys steal food from villages and terrorise the indigenous monkeys.

In March the Delhi High Court ordered local authorities to capture all city monkeys and transfer them to a nearby wildlife park within three months. By May little progress had been made and members of the Indian parliament complained that monkeys were routinely entering official apartments and offices in central Delhi.

The city government says that it has advertised for people to join its current team of three monkey catchers but has received no responses, despite offering 450 rupees (£5) a monkey.

Experts say that one of the only ways to keep the rhesus macaques at bay is to use the larger langur monkey to scare them off. Demand is now so great that their owners are said to be earning up to 10,000 rupees a month.

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