In the murder case of Sister Abhaya in Kerala, in which two priests and a nun were accused, the court received a doctored CD of the narco tests that had been prepared by Malini.

A Kerala High Court judge said that the editing was ‘clearly visible to the naked eye and to find out the evident editing even an expert may not be necessary’.16 So crudely was it done. Yet, this middle-rung official of a regional forensic lab was one of the most decisive players in some of the biggest terrorist cases in India: the Mumbai train blasts, the Malegaon blasts and the terrorist bombings in Hyderabad, among other cases.

However, Dr Narco’s run did not last. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, courts found that Malini had repeatedly misled India’s already shaky war on terror.17 On 25 February 2009, the Karnataka government sacked her for forging her educational certificates to secure her position.18 A few months earlier, a confidential police investigation had found that Malini had changed her year of birth from 1960 to 1964 so that she could qualify for the powerful position of assistant director of the FSL, deciding the fate of sensational cases. The report also accused her of submitting fake certificates issued by the University of Calgary, claiming that she had undergone basic and advanced hypnotherapy courses. The investigation found that the forged certificates had silly spelling errors, and the Karnataka police termed her a ‘security risk’.

By the time she was sacked, India’s most famous narco-analyst had conducted over 1,000 narco tests, some 3,000 lie-detection tests and 1,500 brain-mapping tests, according to a report in the Bangalore Mirror.19 No one cared to go back to her findings and tests, or assess their impact on the many criminals and innocents she had indicted through them. In 2010, the Supreme Court held that narco analysis, brain-mapping and polygraph tests conducted without the consent of an individual were illegal and a violation of personal liberty