Niharika S. Rao
The Lok Sabha was unusually loud for a Tuesday. It was Budget Week, and the chamber buzzed with tension as news channels lined up outside, their OB vans broadcasting red-tickered hysteria. Inside, Home Minister Veer Pratap Singh stood tall in a beige Nehru jacket, sleeves rolled to the elbows like a man ready for war. His voice thundered across the hall, echoing with the force of someone who had weathered revolutions and riots.
“And let it be known,” he declared, slamming his hand on the podium, “this government will never bow to blackmail. The truth will be tabled—whether the opposition likes it or not!”
A few MPs jeered. Some thumped desks in approval. The Speaker tried to restore order with his trademark gavel bangs. But Veer Pratap barely noticed. His jaw was tight, his hand clutching a folded file with a red wax seal marked “CLASSIFIED – INTERNAL SECURITY”.
And then—he stopped.
Mid-sentence, his eyes rolled back. A beat. Then a spasm ran down his arm. The file slipped from his hand. He stumbled back two steps, arms flailing as if trying to hold on to an invisible rail.
A gasp echoed through the hall.
“Doctor! Someone call the doctor!”
Chaos erupted. Security rushed in. Cameras caught every frame as Veer Pratap Singh crumpled to the Parliament floor, still gripping his chest. Within minutes, he was rushed to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, lifeless before he reached the ambulance doors.
The official cause of death: Cardiac arrest.
By evening, social media was flooded with tributes. News anchors called him a fallen lion. Prime Minister Karan Shastri declared a two-day mourning period. Hashtags like #VeerAmarRahe and #LionOfLalQila trended across platforms. His last speech went viral, especially the line: “Truth will be tabled…”
But one person wasn’t buying the story.
Rehan Malhotra, thirty-seven, sat on the floor of his one-bedroom flat in Rajinder Nagar, laptop open, chai untouched. A journalist who once made front-page headlines with his sting on a defence scam, Rehan had spent the last year in journalistic exile, blackballed by every major media house after his report on custodial killings in Bastar named a Union Minister. The same minister Veer Pratap Singh was about to expose today.
At 11:34 PM, Rehan’s ProtonMail pinged.
Sender: Unknown
Subject: Raktarekha Begins
Body: He didn’t die of a heart attack. He was silenced. Start with the file he dropped. Look under Page 7. The line runs red.
Attached was a photo—grainy, clearly zoomed-in from Parliament CCTV. It showed Veer Pratap mid-fall, the red-sealed file flying from his hand. The seal had broken. A single page, corner folded, slid halfway across the carpet.
Rehan’s heart raced. He checked the email header. Encrypted. Routed through a German server. He stared at the subject line again. “Raktarekha Begins.”
It wasn’t random. That word—Raktarekha—had appeared once before. A file leaked five years ago in an internal RAW intelligence brief. Code-named Project Raktarekha, it was dismissed publicly as a rumour. The file had allegedly named bureaucrats, intelligence officials, and ministers complicit in manipulating internal conflicts in Kashmir, Chhattisgarh, and the Northeast for political mileage.
Rehan stood up. He was suddenly aware of the silence in his apartment, the faint hum of the refrigerator, the occasional bark from the alley below. He shut the laptop and drew the curtains.
Across the city, in a guarded bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi, someone else was not sleeping either.
Shalini Verma had once been Delhi’s rising IPS star, until she filed a case against her senior over a botched encounter involving a teenage boy in Meerut. Ever since, she’d been posted to Personnel Training. A glorified filing desk.
Tonight, she sat on her balcony, a whiskey glass untouched, staring at the news ticker flashing Veer Pratap’s collapse on repeat.
She remembered him. He had once visited her academy as Guest of Honour. Had told her, “India doesn’t need more police. It needs more honest ones.” That was before politics had swallowed him.
Her phone buzzed.
Blocked Number.
She let it ring. On the third ring, she picked up.
“ACP Shalini Verma?” a male voice asked.
“Former.”
“I suggest you become active again.”
“Who is this?”
“Someone who doesn’t want to see more good men die.”
There was a click. The line went dead.
Back in Rajinder Nagar, Rehan reopened the image. He zoomed in on the paper sliding out of the file. A single heading was barely legible: OPERATION TRINETRA: Status – Active.
He had never heard of it. But he knew someone who might.
The next morning, Rehan was at Connaught Place, seated at a café frequented by former intelligence officers. A greying man with nicotine-stained fingers lit a cigarette and sat across from him.
“You’re still alive?” the man asked, amused. “Didn’t they blacklist you?”
“I need to know about Operation Trinetra,” Rehan said without preamble.
The man’s smile vanished. “Where did you hear that?”
“From a dead man’s file.”
The man leaned in. “Then you’d better be very careful what you open next.”
Outside, the city carried on — street vendors shouted, scooters honked, chai steamed. But Rehan Malhotra felt it. A storm had begun. The first minister was dead. The file was real. And the line had been crossed.
Raktarekha had begun.
The Parliament resumed session under the shadow of Veer Pratap Singh’s death. Draped portraits and two minutes of silence did little to ease the growing discomfort in the corridors of power. Outside Gate No. 1, journalists clawed for statements. Inside, allies were already shifting chairs, measuring distances, reading the wind.
Rehan Malhotra stood behind a barricade, press ID around his neck, barely acknowledged by the uniformed security. He hadn’t worn that lanyard in almost a year. But it still opened doors—especially with the right bluff. “Live update from Hind Bharat TV,” he whispered, flashing the badge like a fake passport. The jawan nodded, barely checking his bag.
He wasn’t here to report. He was here to steal.
The red-sealed file Veer had dropped had vanished. Rehan had called five MPs who were in the chamber that day. Three didn’t pick up. One hung up. The last—a junior MP from Assam—texted only two words: “Not safe.”
But Rehan had a plan. The Parliament’s underground press archive kept live transcripts of all sessions, including internal recordings not released to public channels. He needed access for just ten minutes.
As he moved past the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, surrounded by black-coated men on their phones, Rehan saw a woman watching him from a distance. Slim frame, khaki salwar suit, hair neatly tied. Her eyes didn’t blink. She held a phone but wasn’t scrolling. He recognized that kind of stillness — former police. Probably IB.
He ducked into the side corridor.
In Room 5B, the archive department was a dull series of old computers and pan-stained drawers. Rehan greeted the lone staffer, an old man who looked like he belonged to the Nehru era.
“Sir, I’m here for a reference check on Singh’s speech. The last one. I need the raw transcript, Hindi version.”
The old man squinted. “Which media?”
“Hind Bharat. We’re doing a documentary on his speeches.”
The man sighed, opened a drawer, pulled out a white folder and inserted a flash drive. “Don’t take it out of this room. Five minutes.”
Rehan nodded, palms sweating. He plugged in his own pen drive quickly.
The raw transcript was already eerie: the words Veer Pratap didn’t finish. And there, just before he collapsed, was a line that had been redacted in the public release:
“…and those officials complicit in Operation Trinetra will be named in the addendum tomorrow…”
Rehan’s breath caught. The public video ended with “this government will never bow…” but the real version had more. The addendum. The names. Someone had pulled it.
He saved everything and unplugged.
Just as he turned, he found the woman from outside standing at the door. Not IB. Shalini Verma.
“You’re not from Hind Bharat,” she said flatly.
“And you’re not press either.”
“Former IPS. Watching people like you.”
“Well, watch faster. Things are about to get louder.”
She glanced at his hand. “That drive contains classified transcript data.”
“Do you want it?” he asked, holding it up.
She didn’t move. “I want to know why Veer Pratap Singh mentioned Operation Trinetra. That was buried long ago.”
“You know it?”
“I buried parts of it myself.”
Rehan frowned. “You were involved?”
“Not in the planning. In the cover-up.”
The room chilled.
“Tell me everything,” he said.
She paused. “Outside. Not here. You’re being followed.”
They exited from the fire door and merged into the visitors’ crowd. As they walked past Constitution Club, Rehan asked, “So what is Trinetra?”
“A surveillance-and-elimination program created post-Godhra, but operated unofficially through third-party handlers,” she replied. “Think ghost squads. No records, no uniforms, no trials.”
“And who signed off?”
“No signature needed. Just a verbal nod from someone in power.”
“Was Veer Pratap one of them?”
She shook her head. “He was part of the committee that tried to stop it in 2017. That made him dangerous.”
“And now?”
“Now he’s the first. But not the last.”
They stopped under a peepal tree. Shalini pulled out a photo from her file.
“This is the man who activated Trinetra again,” she said. “Name: Devajit Sinha. Cabinet Secretary. Unofficially, he runs more operations than RAW.”
The photo showed a lean man in his 60s, bespectacled, clean-shaven, always behind someone in public pictures.
“He’s untouchable,” she said. “Unless someone leaks everything.”
Rehan looked at the drive in his hand. “And if we leak it?”
She smiled without warmth. “We’ll be found in pieces.”
That night, Rehan sat in his flat, staring at a blinking cursor.
Do you want to send this file to: ALL PRESS CONTACTS? [Y/N]
His finger hovered. Then stopped. No. This needed strategy. A plan.
Instead, he opened an encrypted email account and typed:
Subject: Trinetra – Live Target List Exists
To: S.Verma@protonmail.com
Attachment: RAW_TRANSCRIPT_VEER.PDF
Message: We need the addendum. Or we’ll just be chasing ghosts.
He clicked send.
The next morning, in a basement lab near South Block, a masked man opened a steel locker. Inside was a bloodstained file marked TRINETRA – ADDENDUM NAMES. He flipped to the back.
Two names were underlined in red:
- Rehan Malhotra
- Shalini Verma
He smiled.
Targets activated.
In a dimly lit government guesthouse outside Chanakyapuri, a retired intelligence officer adjusted the volume on his hearing aid and played the intercepted voice recording once more. A man’s voice, clear and clipped, said: “Activate Ashoka Protocol. Target two — Rehan Malhotra. Target three — Shalini Verma. All action to remain within Trinetra parameters. Disavowal guaranteed.”
The old man leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed. “They’re bringing back ghosts,” he muttered. And when ghosts walked again, blood followed.
Across the city, Rehan Malhotra sat with a bowl of stale cornflakes, staring at his cracked phone screen. The new SIM card he had bought two hours ago had already received three anonymous messages:
- You’re playing with fire.
- We know what you have.
- You have 48 hours to disappear.
He wasn’t new to threats. But these weren’t trolls or angry politicians. These were systematic. Quiet. Real.
A knock at the door made him freeze. He reached for the kitchen drawer, pulled out the rusted paper cutter he kept near his bills.
“Relax,” came a voice from outside. “It’s me.”
Shalini Verma stepped in, dressed in jeans and a kurta, her hair loose. “We’re being hunted,” she said without pleasantries. “That Code: Ashoka you mentioned in your email? That’s real. I found a reference to it in a declassified R&AW training file. It’s a kill order. But worse—it’s off-books.”
Rehan closed the curtains and motioned her to sit. “What does Ashoka stand for?”
“It’s not an acronym. It’s a metaphor,” she replied. “Based on Emperor Ashoka after Kalinga. A state turns ruthless before it embraces peace. In this case, the state’s wrath comes first.”
He poured her tea. “I found something else. Look.”
Rehan opened the drive and pulled up an audio clip. “This is Veer Pratap’s private voice memo from two nights before his death. It was embedded in the metadata of a backup from his parliamentary laptop. No one found it because it wasn’t labeled.”
He hit play. Veer’s tired voice crackled through the speaker.
“If this reaches anyone—know that I did not kill those civilians in Operation Trinetra. I tried to stop the encounter unit. But someone else signed the operational order… not me. I have the names. I will present them as Annexure B. May God forgive me for what I couldn’t prevent.”
Shalini’s eyes widened. “Annexure B. That’s the addendum.”
Rehan nodded. “But it’s gone. Burned. We have only a transcript of his speech, and this voice memo.”
She stood. “We need to trace the Annexure.”
“Any idea where?”
She hesitated. “There’s one place. But getting in is dangerous.”
“Where?”
She looked at him. “National Archives. Special Access Section. Under North Block. Only accessible with a coded badge from the Cabinet Secretariat.”
Rehan sighed. “Of course it is.”
That evening, they drove together in an old silver Maruti van, parking two streets away from the Ministry. Shalini reached into her bag and pulled out two security badges.
“You stole these?”
“I borrowed them from a friend who works there,” she said. “He’s been on sick leave for months. Nobody notices the lower-rung staff.”
They slipped past the iron gates, past sleepy guards drinking chai, and entered the marble corridor of the Archives Wing. Inside, the air smelled of old dust and disinfectant. Tube lights buzzed above thick stacks of sealed files.
Shalini led them down a staircase not open to the public. At the end of a stone hallway was a keypad locked vault marked “Restricted: Level 5 Clearance”.
She entered a string of numbers.
“Where did you get the code?”
“Same friend. He owed me a favor.”
The vault door clicked open.
Inside, rows of black folders sat in a temperature-controlled room, each marked with a coded color tab. Red for security, blue for diplomatic, green for political. In the far-left rack, Shalini found what she was looking for.
“Here—folder #TRN/021-B. Annexure files, sealed after Veer Pratap’s deposition.”
She opened it.
Rehan leaned in. The pages were stamped “EYES ONLY – PRIME MINISTER’S OFFICE.” And on the first page: a list of ten names.
Four were sitting MPs. Two were senior bureaucrats. One was a media mogul. Another a mining baron. The last two were shockers—Devajit Sinha (Cabinet Secretary) and a code name: ‘Ashoka–X’.
“No real name?” Rehan whispered.
Shalini flipped the last page. “Wait. There’s more. Here—operational blueprint. It says: Trinetra continues via Ashoka–X. Primary control from South Block. Secondary from…”
She stopped. Her face turned pale.
“What?” Rehan asked.
She pointed. “…‘The Ashoka Hotel, Room 414. Secured line. Weekly meets.’”
A luxury hotel in central Delhi. Hidden in plain sight.
Before they could process it, an alarm buzzed outside.
Red lights flickered in the corridor.
“Someone tripped motion sensors,” Shalini said. “We’ve got two minutes.”
They shoved the annexure into Rehan’s bag, shut the vault, and ran. Back through the hallway, up the stairs, out into the quiet night.
As they reached the car, a black SUV screeched into the lane. Headlights on full beam. Three men jumped out, armed.
Rehan and Shalini dove behind a parked bus.
One of the men shouted, “Take them alive!”
Shalini pulled Rehan toward an alley. “This way!”
They sprinted through the narrow lanes, jumped into the van, and peeled out onto Ashoka Road, dodging the SUV by inches. Bullets struck the rear windshield as they swerved into Connaught Circus.
Breathless, Rehan glanced in the mirror. “Who the hell are they?”
“Not police. Not CBI. Probably private contract enforcers.”
“Sent by Ashoka–X?”
She nodded. “Now we know too much.”
Rehan tightened his grip on the wheel. “Then it’s time the country knows too.”
By the time they reached Shalini’s safehouse in South Delhi, it was 2:40 a.m. The city outside had dimmed to a murmur—rickshaws parked under trees, neon shop boards flickering their last, the occasional howl of a street dog. Inside the two-room apartment above a shuttered cyber café, Rehan dropped onto the floor with the stolen folder in his lap.
Shalini double-locked the door and drew all the curtains before sitting opposite him. Her chest still heaved from the chase. On the coffee table between them lay the black folder marked #TRN/021-B, stamped with a circular seal: PMO—EYES ONLY. That alone, if leaked, could cause a constitutional storm.
Rehan opened it slowly, this time page by page.
Page 1: The mission overview—Operation Trinetra. A top-secret counter-insurgency and political control protocol, activated unofficially in 2006 after the Malegaon blasts. No parliamentary oversight. No legal sign-off.
Page 2: Execution cells. Composed of ex-military assets, rogue officers, and private intelligence contractors. No IDs. No uniforms. Only aliases.
Page 3: Results—56 eliminations across seven states. Political rivals, journalists, activists, and rogue bureaucrats. Each death staged to appear accidental or criminal.
Page 4: An internal memo handwritten by Veer Pratap Singh.
“Raktarekha has been crossed. The state no longer distinguishes between enemy and citizen. I was complicit by silence. I must speak before silence claims me too.”
“Raktarekha,” Rehan muttered. “That’s where he named the file. That’s what the email subject said.”
Shalini nodded grimly. “In Sanskrit, it means ‘line of blood.’ In political jargon, it’s the boundary between lawful governance and autocratic control.”
“What did he mean when he said the state sees no difference between citizen and enemy?”
“He meant Trinetra began with real threats—terrorists, extremists. But later, it was used to target inconvenient voices. Whistleblowers. Investigative journalists. Judges who asked too many questions.”
Rehan looked up. “And now it’s been reactivated.”
Shalini turned to the last page. A printed photo had been stapled to it. The image was grainy, zoomed in from a hotel surveillance camera.
Room 414. The Ashoka Hotel. A round table. Four men in suits. The angle cut off their faces, but one was clearly Devajit Sinha, the Cabinet Secretary. The others were less clear—but one wore a lapel pin from SanghRaksha Foundation, a shadowy NGO with ties to several ruling party MPs.
Beneath the image, a name stood out in bold:
Ashoka–X: Operational Commander – Identity Classified.
Rehan ran his hand through his hair. “So the man behind all this doesn’t exist on paper?”
Shalini stood and walked to her steel locker. From it, she pulled a thin red diary, worn and hand-written.
“This is my personal log from 2017. When I was still with Intelligence Bureau. I never turned it in. It has one detail we might need.”
She flipped to a dog-eared page.
Note: February 12, 2017 – Sinha met with ex-DIG Arun Thakkar in Hotel Ashoka, Room 414. Two hours. Thakkar retired mysteriously the next month. Disappeared from public life.
“Arun Thakkar,” Rehan said slowly. “I’ve heard that name. He led the JNU surveillance program during the student protests. Then vanished.”
Shalini nodded. “He had no funeral. No obit. Just… disappeared.”
Rehan stood. “We find him, we find Ashoka–X.”
“But if he’s dead?”
“Then we find his family. Someone knows.”
Shalini opened her laptop. “I’ll check property records. He had a bungalow in Noida. If it hasn’t been seized, maybe his wife or son’s still there.”
As they worked, Rehan’s burner phone vibrated. One message. No sender.
You took something that isn’t yours. Return the file. Or we will retrieve it—piece by piece.
He didn’t reply. But he knew. They were being watched.
Three hours later, just before dawn, they stood outside Sector 44, Noida, in front of a whitewashed bungalow with broken window grills and a dried-up garden. A rusted scooter lay toppled near the gate. It looked abandoned. But there were fresh footprints in the dust.
Shalini knocked.
A minute passed.
Then, a faint voice from inside: “Who are you?”
Rehan stepped forward. “Friends of Arun Thakkar. We mean no harm. We need to talk.”
The door opened slightly. A boy, no older than nineteen, peeked through. Dark circles under his eyes. Skeletal frame.
“I’m Aryan. His son.”
“Is your father—”
“He’s dead,” the boy said. “Five years now.”
“May we come in?”
He hesitated, then opened the door.
The living room was dim and dusty, books stacked like barricades. An old laptop sat on the dining table, screensaver blinking.
Aryan poured them water. “He died at night. No illness. No accident. Just collapsed in the garden. We were told it was a heart issue. But there was blood. His tongue was blue. My mother… she stopped talking after that.”
Rehan sat forward. “Did he leave anything behind? A journal? Documents?”
Aryan nodded slowly. “He used to write long notes. But after he died, someone came. Took everything. Claimed to be from Central Records Bureau. Showed ID, sealed our cupboards. My mother asked questions. Two weeks later, she fell down the stairs. She didn’t survive.”
Shalini’s fists clenched.
“I was sent to a hostel,” Aryan continued. “I ran away last year. This house… they stopped checking after a while.”
“Do you remember any name your father mentioned?” Rehan asked. “Anything unusual?”
Aryan nodded. “Ashoka–X.”
Both Rehan and Shalini froze.
“He used to say,” the boy whispered, “‘Ashoka–X is the darkest part of democracy.’”
Shalini stood and walked to the old steel cupboard. It was locked, but the hinges were rusted. With a small screwdriver, she pried it open.
Inside, among old uniforms and files, was a USB stick taped behind a torn diary cover.
They stared at it.
“Do we plug it in?” Rehan asked.
Shalini looked at Aryan. “Do you trust us?”
The boy nodded. “I want to know why my parents died.”
That night, back at the safehouse, they opened the drive. The folder was titled:
RAKTAREKHA_FINAL.docx
Inside were 12 pages. Each detailing operations, victim names, fund transfers, call recordings, photographs — all connected to Ashoka–X. The kind of file that could bring down a government.
Rehan sat back.
“We leak this,” he said, “and half of Delhi burns.”
Shalini didn’t blink. “Then let it burn.”
The black SUV was back.
It idled on the far side of the road, parked under a flickering streetlight, just beyond the range of the CCTV cameras. Tinted windows. No number plate. It hadn’t moved for an hour, but Rehan and Shalini both knew what it meant — they’d been tracked.
Inside the safehouse, the air was tight with urgency. Aryan sat cross-legged on the floor, holding his late father’s USB drive like a relic. Rehan backed up its contents to three cloud servers under aliases he’d created long ago, the kind used by whistleblowers and hackers across the globe. Meanwhile, Shalini kept her SIG Sauer pistol tucked in her waistband, eyes on the street through a slit in the curtain.
“We don’t have much time,” she said.
“They won’t enter without confirming we’re inside,” Rehan replied. “They’re waiting for a visual.”
Aryan looked up. “So what do we do?”
Rehan glanced at Shalini. “We move. Right now.”
They packed fast—just the essentials. Laptops. Drives. Phones. No clothes. No bags. Shalini doused the entire place in isopropyl alcohol, then lit a corner of the curtain with a match.
A thick flame hissed upward.
They ran.
Down the back stairs, into the alley, through the neighboring market street—where carts of half-rotten vegetables lay unattended. It was 3:12 AM. The only witness was a sleeping dog.
At the end of the street, an auto driver snored against the handlebars.
Shalini slapped a ₹500 note in his palm. “Emergency. Go. Fast.”
“Where?”
“Rajghat.”
The auto sputtered into life as smoke rose behind them.
From the SUV, a man in a navy windbreaker stepped out, spoke into his collar mic. “Target is on the move. Fire set. Engaging secondary team.”
In another street, a second black SUV peeled out of a parking lot.
Rajghat was a diversion. Their real destination was a small farmhouse near the Yamuna bank, once owned by Shalini’s uncle. It had no cameras. No guards. Just a lock and silence.
By 4 AM, they were inside.
Only then did Rehan collapse onto the bed, chest heaving. Shalini locked the doors behind them and scanned their bags.
“We have the file. The proof. Now what?”
“We publish it,” Rehan said. “All of it. Simultaneously. Multiple platforms.”
Aryan interrupted. “But they’ll discredit it. Say it’s fake. Propaganda.”
“Unless someone vouches for it,” Shalini said. “Someone from inside.”
Rehan sat up. “Someone like the Speaker of the Lok Sabha?”
Shalini raised an eyebrow. “You’re joking.”
“No,” he said, pacing. “The Speaker, Vinayak Basu. Veer Pratap was his political mentor. They entered Parliament the same year. Rumor was, Veer was grooming him to clean the system from within.”
“You think he’d help?”
“He’s silent now. But maybe because he doesn’t know the full truth. Maybe he’s scared. But if we give him this file… maybe he’ll act.”
“Or maybe he’ll hand it straight to Ashoka–X.”
“Then we’ll know where he stands.”
By sunrise, they had a plan.
Shalini sent an encrypted message from a scrambled relay server:
TO: office.speaker@gov.in
SUBJECT: URGENT – Concerning Veer Pratap Singh
BODY:
You were his friend. You have a duty. Annexure B exists. Operation Trinetra wasn’t over. We have proof. If you want to read it in person—come alone. 10 AM. Dargah café, Nizamuddin.
No attachments. No names. Just the bait.
At 10:06 AM, a white Honda Accord pulled up outside the café.
Rehan watched from a distance.
The Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Vinayak Basu, stepped out wearing a white kurta and dark glasses. No security.
Inside, he ordered tea and sat in the farthest booth. He looked older than his pictures—lines under his eyes, face worn by decades of political pressure.
Rehan approached the table and slid a brown envelope across.
“Read this. It’s everything Veer Pratap died trying to say.”
Vinayak didn’t speak for three full minutes. His fingers trembled slightly as he read the names—Sinha, Thakkar, the NGO operatives, the pseudonym Ashoka–X.
“I suspected,” he said finally, voice low. “But I never had proof.”
“You do now.”
“They’ll kill me if I act.”
“They’ll kill all of us if you don’t.”
The Speaker looked at Rehan. “Do you want me to call a press conference? Table it in Parliament?”
“No,” Shalini said, stepping into view. “We want you to activate parliamentary privilege—and initiate an emergency investigation committee. Quietly. Under Rule 184.”
Vinayak nodded slowly. “It will take courage.”
“Then borrow some from Veer,” Rehan replied.
Back at the farmhouse, the black SUVs were gone—but the threat remained. Shalini tripwired the backdoor and set up a motion sensor linked to her phone.
Aryan sat quietly, holding an old photo of his father in uniform.
“I didn’t even know who he really was,” he whispered.
Rehan sat beside him. “Your father was a patriot. He fought from inside a system that rewards silence. And he paid for speaking.”
“Will they kill me too?”
Rehan didn’t answer right away. Then said, “Not if we finish what he started.”
At noon, Rehan received a text from the Speaker’s private number.
Received. Action initiated. Stay hidden. You are not alone.
Shalini smiled faintly. “That’s something.”
Then the power went out.
The room went dark.
Rehan grabbed a torch. “Check the main switch.”
Shalini moved cautiously toward the fuse box. The sensor didn’t ping.
“Strange,” she said. “They didn’t trip anything.”
Suddenly, Aryan screamed from inside.
They rushed back in to find the window wide open. Curtains flapping. Aryan—gone.
On the window sill was a small metal object.
A silver pen drive with a red tag: “FINAL WARNING”
Rehan picked it up and plugged it in.
A video played.
Aryan sat bound to a chair in a dim room, blindfolded, but alive.
A masked voice echoed:
“You were warned. The next time, it will be a funeral video. Raktarekha ends here—or so does the boy.”
Shalini’s face turned to ice.
“They’ve taken him.”
Rehan’s fists clenched. “Then let’s end it.”
The image of Aryan bound to a chair replayed over and over in Rehan’s head as the pen drive sat on the table like a ticking bomb. Shalini paced the farmhouse living room, her hands on her hips, jaw clenched so tightly her teeth ached. The room still smelled of burnt dust from the backup generator they’d scrambled to start after the power cut. The wind outside rustled the trees violently, like something was warning them — you’re already too late.
“They didn’t just want to scare us,” Rehan said finally. “They want to control the timeline. They’re saying: stop or the kid dies.”
Shalini didn’t look up. “It’s the same pattern.”
“What do you mean?”
“2002. Godhra. It started with fire, didn’t it?”
Rehan turned to her, startled. “That was decades ago.”
“And the beginning of everything Trinetra became,” she said. “The first experimental deployment of extrajudicial control. Do you know who handled internal logistics then? Not police. Not the Army. It was a private crisis management cell — reporting directly to a man who now runs your nightmares.”
“Devajit Sinha.”
“Exactly.”
Rehan sat down. “So Trinetra is built on the ashes of Godhra.”
Shalini nodded. “And every operation since has evolved from the same principle — create chaos, then control the narrative.”
She rummaged through a folder of her old IB notes, pulling out a photocopied page from an internal dossier: PROJECT KSHETRA — 2002, Unofficial Timeline. There, among the list of operatives, was a strange entry: Handler X-A / Field Proxy / Oversight: Devajit Sinha.
“That’s Ashoka–X,” Rehan whispered.
Shalini’s eyes sharpened. “And if we trace the Godhra web, we might find the location where Aryan is being held.”
Rehan leaned forward. “But those records were all destroyed.”
“Not all,” she said.
She stood and walked to the far wall, pulling down an old framed photo of her IPS passing out parade. Behind it was a safe. She opened it to reveal a leather-bound journal marked: Op-Godhra / Unverified Testimonies.
“This was given to me by a retired IB agent who refused to burn it. Said it had the name of every safehouse used during riots for black ops.”
She opened it and flipped pages rapidly. “Here—Safehouse #3: Bapu Farm, near Kalol. Discontinued after 2004. No official tag, but rumored to be used again in 2011 and 2016 during election cycles.”
“Kalol’s near Godhra,” Rehan murmured.
“Exactly where it all began.”
They packed fast again. Shalini took the backup drives, the journal, and a pistol. Rehan carried only a backpack with water, power banks, and two burner phones. Before locking the door, Rehan left a note for whoever might come next:
WE ARE GOING BACK TO WHERE THE BLOOD TRAIL BEGAN. IF WE DON’T RETURN — PUBLISH THE FILE. – R&S
By 2 p.m., they were on the highway, a battered Qualis rumbling down NH48, moving west. As Delhi faded in the rearview mirror, a strange calm settled in — the calm of a storm that already knows where it will land.
By dawn the next day, they reached Kalol, a dusty township lost between political headlines and forgotten files. A thin fog hung over the sugarcane fields, and the town stirred quietly — as if used to carrying too much silence.
Bapu Farm sat behind a rusted iron gate, overgrown with weeds. No signboard. Just a fading red tilak mark on the gatepost.
Shalini scanned the area. “No drones. No visible guards.”
“That’s worse,” Rehan muttered. “Means everything’s hidden.”
They entered from the side, crawling through a broken fence.
Inside, three buildings stood—one large hall, two storage sheds. The main building had fresh tire marks. The soil still held heat.
Suddenly, a faint sound—metal scraping.
Rehan froze.
From the shed to the right, came the sound again.
Shalini raised her pistol. They moved silently, step by step, until they reached the door. It was ajar.
Inside, they found a young man, tied to a chair, blindfolded, gagged.
“Aryan!”
Rehan rushed forward. Shalini covered them, gun raised.
Aryan’s skin was pale, his lips dry, but he was alive. As Rehan untied him, Aryan mumbled something through the gag. Shalini pulled it off.
“Trap,” he gasped. “It’s… a…”
Too late.
A flash grenade exploded just outside the shed.
Shalini fell, temporarily blinded. Rehan covered Aryan as three figures in military-grade vests burst in.
One struck Rehan across the back with a rifle butt.
Blackness.
When Rehan came to, he was in a different room — sterile, windowless. A single chair. He was cuffed. His head throbbed.
Opposite him stood a man he had seen only once in the background of a press photo.
Devajit Sinha.
“Rehan Malhotra,” he said calmly, as if reading a resume. “Fired from India Today. Exposed a minister’s encounter racket. Now playing journalist vigilante.”
Rehan tried to speak. His mouth was dry.
Sinha poured him water, but didn’t offer it.
“You think you’re the hero. But you’re a chaos agent. You don’t understand what we’re trying to preserve.”
“You mean power?” Rehan rasped.
“No,” Sinha said. “Order. People don’t want truth. They want stability. We give it to them. You dig under it.”
He leaned in.
“Raktarekha isn’t just a line of blood. It’s a firewall. Between this fragile democracy and anarchy.”
Rehan stared at him. “Then why kill the ones who tell the truth?”
“Because truth is expensive. It doesn’t win elections.”
Rehan spat blood. “Veer Pratap believed otherwise.”
“Veer Pratap was sentimental. And sentiment is weakness.”
The door opened.
Shalini was dragged in, bruised but unbroken. They threw her beside Rehan.
“You have one choice,” Sinha said. “Hand over the original drive. We delete everything. You walk free. The boy goes home.”
“And if we don’t?” Shalini hissed.
“You’ll vanish. Quietly. Like your friend Thakkar.”
Rehan laughed, even through the pain.
“We’ve already uploaded it. Three servers. Three continents. And if we don’t send the decryption code in 24 hours—every major newsroom gets it.”
Sinha’s smile faltered.
“You’re bluffing.”
Shalini met his gaze. “Try us.”
For the first time, Sinha looked uncertain.
He turned to the guards. “Take them to holding. I need to make a call.”
As the door closed behind him, Shalini whispered to Rehan, “You actually uploaded it?”
He smiled. “No. But he doesn’t know that.”
She smiled back. “Good bluff.”
They had 24 hours.
And the war had just turned personal.
The holding cell smelled of rust and sweat. A bare bulb flickered above, casting long shadows across the concrete floor. There were no windows, only a bolted steel door with a tiny slit. Rehan lay on the ground, his shirt soaked in blood and humidity, his eyes on the flickering bulb. Shalini sat propped against the wall, one eye bruised, her breath steady but shallow.
“I’m counting the seconds between the bulb’s flicker,” Rehan whispered. “Every three-point-two seconds.”
“You really need a new coping mechanism,” Shalini muttered, cracking a tired smile.
Silence. Then Rehan said, “What do you think Sinha’s doing right now?”
“Calling Ashoka–X,” she replied. “Trying to verify our bluff. And if he finds out we’re lying…”
“We won’t make it to sunrise.”
A distant clang echoed — footsteps. Slow. Measured.
Shalini stiffened. “We may not have to wait till sunrise.”
The door creaked open. Two guards entered, flanking a middle-aged man in a white shirt, thin-rimmed glasses, and a nervous smile. He looked nothing like the enforcers. He looked… afraid.
“I’m Dr. Raghav Menon,” he said quickly. “I’m… here to check your vitals. Standard protocol.”
Shalini’s instincts kicked in. “You’re not a medic.”
“No,” he whispered, lowering his voice. “I’m from inside the PMO. And I don’t have long.”
Rehan sat up slowly. “What?”
“I used to work under Principal Secretary Gokhale. I saw the file you stole… years ago, before it was buried. I believed it. But no one would listen. When I heard your names in an internal dispatch… I found a way to get transferred to this location as part of an ‘intelligence audit’ team.”
Shalini looked skeptical. “You could be leading us into a trap.”
Menon nodded. “If I was, you’d be dead already.”
Rehan’s eyes locked on his. “Why now?”
Menon hesitated. “Because there’s a note. A hidden addendum that never made it to the main file. Veer Pratap had it in his personal locker at the PMO. After his death, it was destroyed.”
“By who?” Shalini asked.
“Not Sinha. Higher.”
Silence fell.
Rehan leaned forward. “Higher than the Cabinet Secretary?”
Menon glanced around nervously. “There’s a backchannel group — four men. No names. Only codenames: Ashoka–X, Yama, Sudarshan, and Naraka. They run Raktarekha. But Veer Pratap discovered a fifth name, an actual serving official in the PMO who coordinated everything.”
“Who?” Shalini whispered.
Menon pulled a folded sheet of yellowing paper from his pocket.
“It’s a copy I made years ago. I risked my life for it. I’ve kept it in my shoe for the last two days.”
Rehan unfolded it. A typewritten note, unsigned. Half the letters faded. But one line stood out:
“Ashoka–X reports directly to PM’s Chief Legal Advisor, Shiv K. Rana. All actions to be verbally authorized only. No records. No trails.”
Shalini stared. “Rana?”
Rehan blinked. “I’ve met him. He’s been in every administration since 1995. Drafted half the country’s emergency ordinances. Quiet. Clean.”
“Exactly why no one suspects him,” Menon said. “He’s the fifth node. The hidden architect.”
Rehan folded the note. “This changes everything.”
Suddenly — footsteps again. Faster. Heavier.
Menon turned pale. “I have to go. If they see me here…”
But it was too late.
The guards outside opened the door, surprised to see Menon still there.
“I was… monitoring their vitals,” he stammered.
One guard stepped forward, face hardening. “You’re not supposed to be in this wing.”
“Then take me out,” Menon said, straightening his shoulders.
As they dragged him away, Rehan looked at Shalini.
“We have the key.”
“And now we have a timer.”
Two hours later, under cover of darkness and confusion — a short-circuit triggered in the farm’s solar generator — Shalini acted.
The two guards were distracted. She feigned unconsciousness. Rehan shouted for help.
When one guard entered alone, Shalini struck.
She snapped his neck in one fluid move. Took his baton, keys, and pistol. Within seconds, they were out of the cell, dragging Aryan from the next room.
He was weak but conscious.
“You came back,” he whispered.
“We never left,” Rehan said.
They slipped out through the service corridor. Past the crates of grain and fake NGO relief boxes. Past rooms lined with data cables and redacted files. Rehan filmed everything.
Outside, they hotwired a pickup truck parked behind the shed. It had a SanghRaksha sticker on the windshield.
“You sure you can drive?” Shalini asked.
“Doesn’t matter,” Rehan muttered. “We just need to get out alive.”
As they barreled down the dirt road, Aryan sat in the backseat, clutching the note from the PMO.
“You really think this Rana guy is the kingpin?”
Rehan nodded. “He’s the only one with reach across judiciary, legislature, and executive. He has immunity. He’s invisible.”
“And now we’ve got his name,” Shalini said.
“But not enough to prove it in court,” Rehan added. “We need something stronger.”
Aryan looked up. “What if there is something?”
Rehan and Shalini turned to him.
“My father… he recorded every conversation on a backup drive hidden inside our old Yamaha keyboard. He said, ‘If I disappear, the truth will play its own tune.’”
Shalini’s face lit up. “Where is it now?”
Aryan closed his eyes. “Hidden in our village house near Mehsana. Nobody goes there. Not since the riots.”
Rehan gripped the wheel tighter. “Then we head to Mehsana.”
Back in Delhi, at the Ashoka Hotel, Room 414, Devajit Sinha sat at a polished conference table. Across from him sat a man in a tailored black suit, face sharp, eyes unreadable.
Shiv K. Rana.
Sinha handed him a report.
“They escaped. Took the safehouse recording and the PMO note. Menon betrayed us.”
Rana didn’t flinch.
“And?”
“They’re heading west. Mehsana, maybe.”
Rana leaned back. “Then send the vultures.”
“And the Speaker?”
“Contain him. Politically. No violence. Yet.”
Sinha hesitated. “If the files leak—”
“They won’t,” Rana said, standing. “I’ve built Raktarekha over three decades. I won’t let it fall to two has-beens and a teenager.”
“But if they find the tape…”
Rana smiled coldly. “Then we’ll simply play our own tune.”
He walked out, leaving the door ajar.
Sinha stared after him — for the first time realizing who was really in control.
And for the first time, feeling afraid.
Mehsana greeted them with silence. Not the peaceful kind, but the kind that weighs heavy in the chest — like a village that remembered too much and spoke too little. Cracked wells. Broken electric poles. A crumbling signboard that read “Haripur, Dist. Mehsana”, leaning like a dying man.
The pickup truck rolled to a stop outside a weather-worn two-storey house. Vines climbed the walls, windows shuttered. The courtyard was buried under dry leaves, but the outline of childhood still lingered — an old swing tied to a neem tree, a rusted tricycle half-sunk in dirt.
“This was home,” Aryan said softly. “Until the fires.”
Shalini scanned the surroundings. “No movement. No drones. No footprints. We’ve got a window.”
Inside, the house smelled of dust and memory. Wooden shelves warped with age. A single calendar still hung in the hallway — January 2002. The kitchen was a ruin. But Aryan moved with purpose, straight toward a locked storeroom under the stairs.
He pulled out an old Yamaha keyboard, its casing cracked. “This is it.”
Rehan raised an eyebrow. “You’re sure the drive’s still inside?”
“My father removed two black keys and hollowed the chamber under middle C,” Aryan said, prying open the compartment. Dust spilled out. But nestled within was a small metal casing. A microdrive, barely bigger than a matchbox.
He handed it to Rehan.
Shalini pulled out her laptop. “No signal. No GPS. We’re safe to connect.”
She slotted it in.
The folder that opened was titled:
“OPERATION TRINETRA – FIELD LOGS – CLASSIFIED AUDIO”
Twenty-three files. Each one date-stamped. Most were voice recordings — scratchy, but intact.
Rehan clicked on one.
“…Rana has given green light. Sinha will manage southern corridor. Phase Two begins after the rally. If resistance arises, apply Protocol Kalika. Civilian loss is acceptable if optics are managed…”
Aryan’s hands clenched.
Another file.
“Thakkar wants out. Claims the encounter was staged. Rana says let him rot. He’s a liability. Use mental pressure. Leak photos. If he breaks, activate Ashoka–X.”
Shalini sat back, stunned.
“This is it,” Rehan whispered. “Proof. Voice-mapped identities. Uncoerced orders. Rana. Sinha. The entire chain.”
He clicked on one last file.
The voice was unmistakable.
Veer Pratap Singh.
“If I disappear, this tape should survive me. I was part of Trinetra’s early phase, but I never sanctioned killings. Rana used our silence. I failed as a patriot. Let this serve as my confession — and my warning.”
Silence.
Even the birds outside had stopped.
Rehan backed up the files, encrypted them into a triple-key server, and handed Aryan a written access code. “If we don’t make it, release them.”
Aryan hesitated. “To who?”
Rehan didn’t answer.
He already knew.
Back in Delhi, Saira Malhotra stood in the kitchen of her two-room apartment in Lajpat Nagar, preparing morning chai. She wore a faded kurta, her black hair tied in a loose bun. Her eyes carried the weariness of a woman who had waited too long for answers.
She hadn’t seen Rehan in weeks. Their last phone call was clipped — him saying “I’m chasing something real this time.” She knew that tone. It always preceded trouble.
The doorbell rang.
When she opened the door, two men in safari suits stood silently. One held a badge.
“Delhi Police. We need to ask about your husband.”
Saira blinked. “Ex-husband.”
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know.”
One of the men stepped in without asking. He scanned the room, opened drawers.
Saira snapped, “You have a warrant?”
He didn’t answer. The other man picked up a framed photo of her and Rehan from their wedding.
“Still care about him?”
She said nothing.
“You should tell him to stop digging,” the man said, placing the photo back. “There’s only one end to this story.”
They left.
Ten minutes later, Saira picked up her phone and called a number she hadn’t dialed in five years.
“Hello?” a voice answered.
“Rehan is in trouble,” she said. “And if you ever meant what you said during the emergency trial coverage—now’s the time to prove it.”
The voice on the other end was low but sharp. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know. But if you don’t help, he won’t make it.”
The man sighed. “I still have friends in the national desk. I’ll do what I can.”
Saira hung up and closed the curtains.
That night, in Mehsana, Rehan sat on the rooftop under a full moon, the village bathed in silver silence. He stared at the stars like he used to as a child, trying to find meaning in patterns. Only now the patterns weren’t constellations — they were conspiracies.
Shalini joined him. “You thinking about tomorrow?”
“I’m thinking about what happens after tomorrow.”
“We release the tapes. The files. Name Rana. Burn it all down.”
“And then?”
Shalini shrugged. “We live. Or we don’t.”
Rehan looked at her. “You ever regret it? Not just walking away?”
She smiled faintly. “Every day. And never once.”
He nodded.
Below them, Aryan curled up on a charpoy, the microdrive clutched to his chest like a talisman.
Shalini leaned back. “You think people will believe it?”
“They don’t have to,” Rehan said. “They’ll hear it. And then, they’ll choose what to believe.”
A sound broke the silence.
A car engine. Then another.
Rehan stood, eyes narrowing.
Headlights glowed beyond the neem trees.
“They’ve found us.”
Shalini drew her pistol. “We fight.”
Rehan looked down at Aryan. “You run.”
Aryan shook his head. “I’m not leaving.”
But Rehan shoved the boy’s shoulder. “Go. Now. Take the data. Take the evidence. If we fall, someone has to finish it.”
Aryan ran. Rehan and Shalini took cover behind the courtyard wall.
Three SUVs pulled in. Armed men stepped out.
Shalini whispered, “They’re not police.”
“They’re cleaners,” Rehan said. “Sent by Rana.”
The first bullet ripped through the neem tree.
The siege had begun.
And so had the reckoning.
Bullets tore through the silence like knives through linen. The neem tree shattered, bark exploding into dust. Rehan ducked behind the wall, Shalini to his right, both breathless but steady. The three SUVs had fanned into a V-formation across the field, beams cutting through the Mehsana dusk, casting long, flickering shadows across the crumbling walls of Aryan’s ancestral house.
“They’re surrounding us,” Shalini muttered, reloading her last magazine. “We’ve got maybe six bullets between us.”
Rehan checked his pocket — two burner phones, one nearly dead, the other without network. “We stall. Long enough for Aryan to escape.”
“How far do you think he got?”
“He’s fast. And smart. If he reaches the town and finds a post office or cyber café…”
She nodded grimly. “Then this story lives, even if we don’t.”
A voice boomed from outside. Amplified through a megaphone.
“Rehan Malhotra. Shalini Verma. You’ve made your point. Come out now — or we torch the building and dig your bones from the ash.”
Shalini fired a warning shot toward the sound. “He sounds bored.”
“They always do when they think they’ve won,” Rehan said.
A burst of gunfire raked the wall inches above his head. Brick splintered. Smoke rose.
He looked at her, a strange calm in his eyes. “You remember the Ayodhya file you leaked in 2014?”
She smirked. “You read it?”
“I framed it.”
More gunfire.
“I never thanked you,” she said.
“Don’t start now.”
Suddenly, an explosion — not from outside, but from the back of the house.
A flash grenade had landed inside the rear courtyard.
They coughed, momentarily blinded.
Boots stomped up the side passage.
Three men in combat vests burst in.
Shalini reacted first. She fired once — a clean headshot.
The second attacker knocked her aside, raising his rifle toward Rehan.
But from the window behind, another bullet struck his shoulder — not from Shalini, not from Rehan.
The third attacker turned, confused — and fell.
A figure stepped through the smoke.
Aryan.
Blood on his cheek, a pistol in his hand — his father’s service revolver.
“I found it in the garden box,” he said, voice shaking. “My dad hid it before they came.”
Rehan stared. “You came back?”
“I wasn’t going to leave you to finish his war alone.”
Outside, the SUVs roared to life again.
More gunmen.
“Fall back!” Shalini shouted.
They climbed to the top floor. Rehan grabbed the microdrive, now inside a steel tin, sealed with tape. He pulled out his last hope — an old satellite modem linked to a solar battery.
“No network,” he muttered.
“Try again,” Shalini said, barricading the door.
The modem blinked.
Then — one green light.
Connected.
Rehan uploaded the files. One by one.
The final video — Veer Pratap’s last confession.
He typed in the email list manually — journalists, activists, independent media, lawyers, international outlets, and… one name he hadn’t thought about until that moment:
Saira Malhotra.
He hit SEND.
And just then — the power cut.
The roof shook. A final SUV had rammed into the back of the house.
“Get to the fields!” Shalini shouted.
They ran down the crumbling stairs, jumped through the window into the overgrown field behind the house. Shots followed. The neem tree collapsed. Dust turned red.
They didn’t stop.
Three hours later, hundreds of kilometers away, Delhi woke up to fire — not from weapons, but from truth.
Every phone buzzed. Every newsroom scrambled. Hashtags exploded.
#RaktarekhaExposed
#VoiceOfVeer
#AshokaXRevealed
#PMOLinks
The drive had reached over two dozen independent platforms. Audio files of Rana. Orders from Sinha. The forgotten voices of the silenced. The full confessions. It wasn’t a leak. It was a detonation.
At 10:14 a.m., the Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Vinayak Basu, invoked Rule 184 — emergency inquiry proceedings against high-ranking officials for “undermining the Constitution through shadow networks of state violence.”
Opposition parties united for the first time in years. MPs shouted for resignations.
Inside the PMO, chaos reigned. Shiv K. Rana stood in his private chamber, watching news feeds spiral out of control.
One of his aides whispered, “Should we prepare a statement?”
Rana didn’t blink. “No. Prepare a flight path.”
“But sir—”
“Now.”
Across town, Devajit Sinha was found unconscious in his South Delhi residence. A half-written suicide note lay beside him. He survived — but didn’t speak.
In Mehsana, Rehan, Shalini, and Aryan lay low in a church shelter, provided by a local contact of Shalini’s — a retired priest who had once served in the Army Intelligence Corps.
“You’ve turned the tide,” the priest said over a steaming kettle of tea. “But tides wash away many things. Including the ones who stir them.”
Rehan nodded. “We just wanted them to hear the truth.”
“You gave them more than truth,” the priest said. “You gave them the names.”
That evening, Shalini received a call from an unknown number.
She answered.
The voice was shaky.
“Shalini, it’s… it’s Basu. The Speaker.”
“Sir?”
“I don’t know if I’ll survive this politically, but thank you. For finishing what Veer started.”
“We didn’t finish it,” she said. “We just lit the match.”
There was a pause. “What do you need now?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Except your word that Rana never gets to write another law.”
“You have it.”
By midnight, arrest warrants were issued for four top officials.
A no-confidence motion was filed against the government.
International media picked it up. UN envoys demanded an inquiry. Human rights lawyers filed fresh PILs.
And somewhere in a safe house outside Jaipur, Saira Malhotra opened her inbox.
Dozens of emails flooded in — one titled: “I was wrong. But I’m not done. — R”
She smiled through tears.
Rehan stood on a small hill overlooking a mustard field. Shalini stood beside him, hand bandaged, but face proud.
“You think they’ll rebuild it all again someday?” he asked.
“They’ll try,” she said. “But next time, we’ll be ready.”
Aryan joined them, eyes on the rising sun.
“My father would have liked this view,” he said.
Rehan handed him a folded page. The first line of Veer Pratap’s last note.
“Let truth be the only inheritance we pass on.”
And beneath that, Rehan had written one more line, in his own hand:
“Raktarekha is broken. Let no one redraw it.”
The Parliament House stood heavy beneath a cloudless Delhi sky, silent for once, but not at peace. Its sandstone walls, which had witnessed a century of voices—some thundering, some trembling—were about to hear one more that could shake the nation.
Rehan sat in the visitors’ gallery, dressed in a plain kurta, a borrowed Parliament guest pass pinned to his chest. Below, the Lok Sabha buzzed like a disturbed hive—MPs hunched in heated whispers, bureaucrats shifting uneasily, and television crews waiting outside with cameras ready, countdown clocks blinking red.
Beside Rehan sat Aryan, eyes still rimmed with grief but glowing with something new: resolve.
Shalini Verma stood three rows behind them, clad in civilian clothes, a subtle nod to the uniform she’d once worn. She was not here as an officer today. She was here as witness. Survivor. Truth-bearer.
At precisely 11:00 a.m., the Speaker, Vinayak Basu, entered.
Everyone stood.
The moment had arrived.
Basu tapped his gavel. “This House stands today not merely to debate policy, but to confront its soul.”
Murmurs echoed.
“The tapes leaked across the world are not fiction. They are not partisan slander. They are the voices of the dead—and the living—crying out from behind layers of secrecy, silence, and state-sanctioned murder.”
The chamber erupted.
One MP from the treasury bench stood, shouting, “This is unconstitutional! Baseless lies!”
But Basu remained firm. “Order. The Chair has verified all materials presented by the Whistleblower Committee. Voice recognition, classified corroboration, and confessions—all authenticated. Operation Trinetra existed. So did Raktarekha.”
Gasps.
“And so does Ashoka–X,” he added.
Now silence.
Basu turned to the gallery, locking eyes with Rehan, then Shalini, then Aryan.
“Those among us who risked their lives to bring this forward have done their duty. It is time we do ours.”
He lifted a folded sheet of paper.
“This is Veer Pratap Singh’s final addendum. It was hidden, destroyed, but recovered. I shall now read it into the official record.”
A pause. A breath. Then:
“Let the Parliament of India know: I did not enter politics to cover up crimes. I entered it to correct them. Operation Trinetra was born in fear, grew in ambition, and metastasized into a monster that preyed on the very citizens it swore to protect. I carry the guilt of my silence. But silence is no longer my answer. These names, this evidence, this blood—may it stain history until we wash it with justice.”
As Basu read the names—Sinha, Rana, the secret NGO networks, the foreign funds—the chamber was still. Like a nation holding its breath.
He folded the paper. “These proceedings are being recorded. All names will be sent to the President’s office for immediate review.”
Outside, the world erupted.
News tickers flashed:
“RAKTAREKHA OFFICIALLY ENTERS PARLIAMENT RECORD”
“FIRST-EVER ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF STATE-BACKED ASSASSINATION RING”
“ASHOKA–X EXPOSED — PMO UNDER SCRUTINY”
Protests broke out across cities. Candlelight marches. Student unions waving Veer Pratap’s picture. Hashtags trending: #LastSpeech, #JusticeForVeer, #RanaResign.
That evening, Shiv K. Rana was arrested at Indira Gandhi International Airport, en route to Zurich. He did not resist. He did not speak.
Devajit Sinha, still recovering in a private hospital, was placed under judicial custody.
Three Members of Parliament resigned the next day.
A week later, in a quieter corner of Delhi, Rehan and Shalini sat across from a small news desk at India Chronicle, an independent newspaper that had published the files first.
The editor, a bespectacled woman in her 50s, leaned back. “You could write a book.”
“No,” Rehan said. “I’ve written enough reports. This story belongs to everyone now.”
Aryan, seated beside them, held a copy of Veer Pratap’s note, now laminated and mounted in the Chronicle’s office.
He whispered, “What if someone tries to rebuild it all? The silence, the shadow network?”
Shalini replied, “Then we make sure people remember this moment. This cost. So that no one crosses that Raktarekha again without thinking twice.”
Two months later, Rehan received a letter. Old-fashioned. Handwritten. No signature.
It read:
“You didn’t kill the monster. But you made it bleed. That’s how all monsters die. Inch by inch. Keep bleeding them.”
No name. No threat. Just truth.
He folded it carefully and placed it inside a notebook marked Raktarekha – Field Notes.
Outside, Delhi buzzed on. No longer peaceful. But maybe, just maybe—awake.
That evening, at a quiet gathering at Rajghat, a small podium was erected. There were no news cameras. No mics. Just people—students, activists, ex-police officers, journalists. Survivors.
They stood as Aryan walked to the front.
He took out a page and began to read.
“My name is Aryan Thakkar. My father was killed for keeping evidence. My mother died asking questions. I have no political party, no ideology. Just the truth. And the truth is—we forgot how easily silence becomes complicity.”
He paused, then held up the laminated note.
“This was Veer Pratap’s last speech. But it won’t be ours. We will speak. Again. And again. Until no one dares to silence us.”
Applause.
Tears.
Hope.
As the sun dipped behind the Mahatma’s eternal flame, Rehan stood beside Shalini, his voice barely above a whisper.
“We didn’t break the system.”
Shalini replied, “No. But we cracked it.”
And sometimes, all revolutions begin with a crack.
END
