Spies thrive amid secret affairs, busted marriages

In case anybody was watching, he left his car at one hotel and sneaked out the back exit of the car park before checking in at another hotel nearby.

It did him little good. When he answered his hotel doorbell early one Sunday morning, it was not room service but his angry wife and his parents, who had just arrived on a flight from Dubai to catch him out.

Rahul Rai was not there to see it. He had telephoned Dubai to tip off the wife after his team of “street smart" graduates and ex-detectives tracked the businessman down after a 45-day surveillance operation.

With the job done, they discreetly pulled out to leave the family to it.

He runs one of India’s many businesses benefiting from the growing wealth of the country’s middle class.

Most of the 50 people who contact him daily are put off by the Rs6,500 per day fee. Yet, he runs up to 20 simultaneous investigations a day across India, up from one or two when he took over the family concern seven years ago.

Failing marriages provide the bulk of the work for the Globe Group’s investigative wing. His operatives rely largely on surveillance, secret photography and fake phone calls from credit card companies to trace and track the targets of their investigations.

In the past, many Indian women could be relied upon to suffer in silence in an abusive or adulterous relationship.

They are now heading to the divorce courts in growing numbers despite the potential for six or seven years of financially ruinous proceedings.

By Western standards, India’s divorce rate is tiny. The 2001 census suggests that 3.3 million people are divorced or separated—fewer than 1% of married people in a nation of more than one billion.

But the figures hide the story of growing changes in a nation where the vast majority of marriages are arranged.

After marriage, women traditionally move in with their husband’s parents, an arrangement that has long been regarded as a model for family stability, but within which domestic violence has been a constant sore.

A new domestic violence act was introduced last year, designed to protect women from abuse in the home.

Lawyers and campaign groups say the new law is just one of a series of social changes, including a new generation of urban women going out to work, that has fuelled the popularity of divorce.

“Women are getting a better position in the family," said Aafreen Siddiqui, from campaigning legal group Lawyer’s Collective.

“They are feeling a sense of empowerment and they have a better negotiating power in relationships."

Sudhir Shah, a leading lawyer in Mumbai with 40 years experience, says about 10% of couples in the major cities were divorcing.

One academic study that looked at 10 years of divorce court papers in Mumbai revealed that more women than men were instigating divorce.

Rahul Rai normally sees the collapse of the marriage before it gets to court but is surprised that two-thirds of his wealthy clients had “love marriages", still a relative rarity in India where an estimated 95% of marriages are arranged.

“That’s very shocking since they go into love marriages and later they find they are not fit for each other," he said. “In the olden days, they also used to be unhappy with each other but due to social pressures they carried on. Now they know they can go for divorce."

It is his job to reveal the evidence of his investigations to the suspicious, fearful and occasionally disbelieving. He has comforted those who have broken down in his office. He even set up an investigation for a man in his 70s who—wrongly, as it turned out—believed his similarly elderly wife was having an affair.