Python debuggers (as well as profilers and coverage tools) use the sys.settrace function (in the sys module) to register a callback that gets called when interesting events happen.
If you’re using Python 2.6, you can call sys.gettrace() to get the current trace callback function. If it’s not None then you can assume you should be passing debug parameters to the JVM.
It’s not clear how you could do this pre 2.6.