Move over pundits, detectives help parties choose candidates

New Delhi: Around elections things become difficult for a political party when thousands of aspirants line up for a few hundred party tickets. All claim to be party loyalists and to have a solid support base. The upcoming Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) election is no different and to make their selection process easier, political parties are turning to private agencies. [caption id=“attachment_273527” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“As choosing candidates gets tougher during poll season the detective agencies also assess the chances of the candidate winning. Reuters”]  [/caption]These agencies, which also provide services such as matrimonial inquiries, corporate investigations and pre and post employment verification, take between a week to 10 days to prepare a background report of a candidate. They supplement the party’s war room in assessing which is the best candidate to pick. They are different from psephologists who conduct pre- poll and post- poll analysis by also looking at whether the candidate’s claims of a possible victory are true. “Parties want to know of the contender’s claims are true. Also, at times, they want to know the ‘winnability’ of the contenders in the opposition camp,” Kunwar Vikram Singh, chairman of Lancer Network one of the oldest detective agencies, said. “The report about a candidate includes his social and financial status, his popularity and civic issues in the area from which he is vying for a ticket,” he added. There have been occasions, Singh said, when a private intelligence agency advised a political leader on what he should do in his constituency to woo the citizens. “We found that a leader was out of sync with his voters. After talking to people we discovered that they were in dire need of a hand pump. We told this to the leader who arranged the hand pump. He was a hit among his voters,” he said. Political intelligence was not always the domain of detective agencies in India. But in the last decade, there has been surge in the trend. Party cadre is not always reliable for doing the verification check of candidates and ticket aspirants- a reason why private intelligence agencies are roped in for these assignments. For the MCD elections, Congress has hired VN Pandit, a retired CBI official and head of Multi-Dimensional Management Consultancy. He submitted a detailed report on various candidates’ chances of winning. “We have an edge over government agencies as our people are locally well connected. Local issues matter the most in MCD elections,” Pandit said.