Away from Rainbow Parades, the Capital's detective agencies are witnessing the darker side of a social change. New-age spying is about checking the sexual orientation of spouses and children and prospective matches.

Leading detective agencies in Delhi say there is a “big increase” in such cases and the trend is growing each passing day.

“In the past two or three years, I have seen so many marriages breaking— more wives than husbands shocked to find that their spouses are homosexuals,” says Sanjeev Deswal, a detective who has been in the profession for over 18 years.

Deswal, 38, owns AIDER detective agency in Katwaria Sarai and employs 36 detectives, eight of them women.

When Deswal joined the profession, the cases were different. “It was mostly fathers trying to find out whether the chosen grooms had a good character or whether daughters were happy in their in-laws' homes,” he says.

These days, he gets cases where he finds people with long-standing marriages carrying on a double life. One such case a couple of months ago involved a woman who suspected her husband of having an extra-marital affair. She had a doubt about his relationships with men too, but was too shy to admit it. “When we showed her that he was a bisexual, she broke down in shock,” he says. “Her adolescent son does not know about it.”

Over the last two years, he had seen over 20 cases of homosexuality, which ended in break-ups of marriages. Before this, over the last 10 years, he saw only two such cases.

... contd.