Indian ‘Miss Marple’ snoops on election candidates
MUMBAI: As India’s best-known female private eye, Rajani Pandit has posed as crazy, blind and deaf to solve murders and unmask unsuitable fiancés. But election time is boom time for the woman dubbed “Miss Marple”.
In the world’s biggest election ending on Sunday, Pandit and others like her are in high demand from political parties to dig up dirt on the opposition and ensure their own candidates are squeaky clean.
“It’s confidential but when a party finds one of its own candidates or an opposition candidate suspicious, they ask us to investigate them.
“Often we are asked to look into their finances and how they procured money to fund their campaigns. We try to maintain a low profile,” said Pandit, 57.
Pandit’s team has been busy “integrating” themselves into political parties since January, inspecting finances and attending rallies before submitting reports to clients.
“There’s usually a surge of cases ahead of the elections. We’ve been inundated with requests and were only able to take on a few,” she said.
Kunwar Vikram Singh, chairman of India’s Association of Private Detectives and Investigators, said: “There’s a lot of due diligence. (A candidate’s) local reputation, influence, his stance in his own caste ... all these things are looked into.”
Private detective agencies are popular in India, with sleuths tasked with solving everything from petty household thefts to business deals gone wrong.
Pandit has been conducting covert operations across India for over 30 years out of her small office in the Asian giant’s financial capital.
She was dubbed India’s first female private detective by media outlets when she began cracking cases in the early 1980s.
She has been featured in countless newspaper articles, often referred to as India’s Miss Marple or Nancy Drew, Agatha Christie’s fictional spinster sleuth and the everevolving US amateur detective. This has encouraged scores of women in male-dominated India to follow in her footsteps.
Several women-dominated investigative firms now operate in the country such as Lady Detectives India and Venus Detective.
“Clients are more open to having a female investigator. They feel that we are more empathetic and they can talk to us,” Lady Detectives chief excutive officer Tanya Puri said.
Pandit has won awards, written two books and completed over 80,000 cases – most of them pre-matrimonial investigations.
She has had to be the master of subterfuge to gather evidence, including donning “various disguises”. But she says she received no formal training.
“Detectives are born, not made. I will keep doing this job until I am no longer alive,” she said.