Mohit Bansal
The Death in Dhaulpur
The bullet tore through the morning stillness like a scream no one wanted to hear.
It was just past 8 a.m. in Dhaulpur, a dusty town carved out of the political belly of eastern Uttar Pradesh. Outside the town hall, Ramveer Bharti was standing atop a makeshift podium, his kurta slightly wrinkled, voice echoing over loudspeakers that had seen too many rallies. A crowd had gathered—farmers in faded dhotis, students with angry eyes, a few women clutching cloth bags, and some just there for the free tea. But they listened. Because when Ramveer spoke, people believed he might be one of them.
Then came the shot. One crack, and everything fractured.
The blood spread across his chest like a blooming red flower. He stumbled. The microphone crashed to the ground. Shouting followed. Screams. Someone yelled, “Police! Police!” But no one came for a long time.
In the crowd, a young man dropped a camera lens cover. His name was Ayaan Khan.
By the time the local police arrived, Ramveer’s body had already been lifted onto a tempo and taken to the district hospital. The podium stood abandoned, like a battlefield after a quick war. Blood still darkened the concrete.
Ayaan lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. “One shot,” he whispered to himself. “Just one.”
He had come to Dhaulpur chasing a different story. A lead on land-grab allegations against MLA Raghunandan Mishra. He hadn’t expected to witness an assassination. Ramveer Bharti, the people’s candidate, was never supposed to die in the open like that. Not while speaking about truth and justice.
A plainclothes inspector, chewing paan, walked up. “You were recording?”
Ayaan nodded. “Freelance journalist. Delhi Press. I was here to interview Bharti.”
The inspector’s eyes narrowed. “Name?”
“Ayaan Khan.”
“You from Lucknow?”
“Originally, yes. But I’m based in Delhi now.”
The inspector made a note. “Don’t leave town. CID’s coming from Lucknow.”
In a safe house 60 kilometers away, Raghunandan Mishra tossed a glass of whiskey against the wall.
“You fools,” he snarled at the two men standing before him. “I said scare him, not kill him in broad daylight!”
One of the men, with a scar down his jaw, mumbled, “We thought—”
“You don’t think! That’s the problem with you bastards!” Mishra paced the floor. “Now the whole state will go up in flames. Do you know what this means before elections?”
The other man, younger and quieter, said, “Bharti was going to expose the fake land registry. He had documents.”
“And now everyone will believe it even more,” Mishra muttered, suddenly tired. He looked at the flickering bulb overhead. “It’s no longer about land now. It’s about revolution.”
Ayaan checked into a crumbling guest house across the station. The kind where the bedsheets didn’t match and the ceiling fan made more noise than it moved air. But he didn’t care.
He reviewed the video on his camera.
Bharti was mid-sentence. “They tell you the land is not yours. But the soil remembers your feet—”
Bang.
Freeze frame.
A tiny black dot—barely visible—near the rooftop of the Panchayat building. Ayaan paused, zoomed. A glint of metal. The shooter had taken the shot from elevation. Professional. This wasn’t a random act of hate. It was planned.
He saved the footage to a hard drive. Made three copies. Then he called his editor.
“Vikram,” he said, “Bharti’s gone. Assassinated.”
“What?” Vikram’s voice cracked.
“I have footage. Clear sound, clear frame. And maybe the shooter.”
There was silence on the line. Then: “You’re staying?”
“I have to.”
“You’ll get yourself killed.”
“Maybe. But this story’s bigger than any of us.”
That night, protests erupted across Dhaulpur. Students burned tires. Farmers marched silently with Bharti’s posters. Candlelight vigils sprung up on the highway. Somewhere, someone set fire to a sugarcane office suspected to be tied to Mishra.
In a corner of the station, an old woman held a portrait of Bharti to her chest and whispered, “He promised to bring back our stolen water. Now who will speak?”
And in Room 107 of Hotel Lotus, Ayaan pieced together a map. Strings tied to names. Arrows linking land scams, police transfers, election fund misappropriations, and three previous deaths marked as “natural.” All roads led back to one name: Raghunandan Mishra.
But it wasn’t just about him. Ayaan felt it in his bones. There was someone higher, someone pulling Mishra’s strings too. Someone who preferred to stay in the shadows.
And maybe—just maybe—Bharti had found that person before he died.
There was a knock.
Ayaan froze.
He hadn’t told anyone his room number.
He reached for his bag. The pepper spray. The hard drive.
Knock. Louder this time.
A slip of paper was pushed under the door.
He picked it up. No envelope. Just a sentence, written in tight black ink:
“They will erase you before morning. Leave now if you want to live.”
The Man Who Knew Too Much
Ayaan didn’t sleep that night.
The note lay on the bed, illuminated by the faint yellow light of the wall sconce. He reread the words over and over, trying to decipher if it was a bluff or a real warning. “They will erase you before morning.” The kind of line that might sound melodramatic in a script. But here, in a decrepit hotel room in the middle of a politically volatile district, it felt like a death sentence whispered between the cracks of the walls.
He packed quickly—camera, hard drive, two notepads, his pen, and the USB stick with backup footage. The room’s landline rang once. Just once. Then silence. A signal. Someone was already watching him.
He didn’t take the front door. Instead, he slipped out through the bathroom window into the alley behind, landing in a heap of garbage and broken bricks. The night smelled of dust and panic.
Outside, the town was deceptively calm. The riots had died down for now, but a strange tension lingered in the air, as if even the trees were holding their breath.
An hour later, Ayaan found himself seated across from a man he hadn’t seen in five years—Inspector Sadaf Nair, suspended for “misconduct” during a major corruption probe in 2020. Back then, Sadaf had been leading an investigation into land mafia activities in Ghazipur before the rug was pulled from under him. Rumors said he knew too much. Others said he got greedy.
But Ayaan remembered the fire in his eyes. The same fire still flickered behind thick glasses and tired wrinkles.
“Where did you find me?” Sadaf asked, stirring his black tea.
“Some cops don’t forget the people who once tried to help them,” Ayaan replied. “I remembered one of your old sources—Lallan—he runs a tire shop now.”
Sadaf chuckled. “That rat still alive?”
“Barely. But he said you might still have… files.”
Sadaf’s smile faded. “Files won’t help you anymore. You think Bharti’s murder was about land and speeches. It’s not. It’s about power. And power doesn’t like to leave footprints.”
“I have footage of the assassin,” Ayaan said.
Now he had Sadaf’s attention.
“Do you know how many people wanted Bharti dead?” the inspector asked quietly. “MLAs. Contractors. A few industrialists. Even Delhi types. But the one you need to worry about… doesn’t appear on paper.”
Ayaan waited.
“They call him ‘Baba.’ No real name. No official designation. But he owns half of Purvanchal’s soul. He doesn’t run for elections. He selects who does.”
“And you’re saying Mishra works for him?”
“No,” Sadaf corrected. “Mishra fears him.”
Somewhere in Lucknow, in a high-rise office cloaked in silence and glass, a phone buzzed once.
A man in a white kurta answered.
“It’s done,” the voice on the other end said.
The man didn’t reply. He hung up and lit a sandalwood incense stick. Then he turned to a large map of Uttar Pradesh on the wall. Three districts were circled in red. Two had been dealt with.
One remained: Dhaulpur.
He picked up a pen and crossed out Ramveer Bharti’s name from a list.
Then he muttered: “Now the journalist.”
In the basement of a shuttered school, Ayaan watched Sadaf unlock a rusted trunk. Inside were piles of old case files, photographs, xeroxed land records, bank receipts—all dismissed as “irrelevant” by the state years ago.
One folder caught his eye.
Case 43-B / Ghazipur Land Corridor Scam / 2019
The file had a list of front companies—one of which matched the name Ayaan had heard in Bharti’s speech the day before: Omkar Holdings Pvt. Ltd. On paper, it was a real estate firm. In practice, it was a ghost entity used to siphon land titles from farmers using forged documents and political muscle.
“You see the signatures here?” Sadaf pointed. “Same notary. Same deputy collector. Across seven different districts. All dated the same week in 2019.”
Ayaan took photos.
“This,” Sadaf whispered, “is the empire Bharti was about to bring down.”
Then Sadaf’s phone lit up.
UNKNOWN NUMBER.
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he handed Ayaan a flash drive. “Take this. It has names, addresses. Even photos.”
“What about you?”
“I’m a ghost already. But you—you’re still visible. And that makes you dangerous.”
At 3:45 a.m., a fire broke out in Hotel Lotus.
Locals gathered to watch the flames climb the peeling walls. Room 107 was the first to be swallowed. When the fire brigade arrived, a body was found charred inside—unidentifiable, but wearing a kurta similar to Ayaan’s.
By dawn, the police issued a statement: “Freelance journalist Ayaan Khan believed dead in accidental fire.”
Mishra smiled when he heard the news.
And somewhere near Ghazipur, “Baba” looked out at the sunrise and said, “One less voice. But not the last.”
But Ayaan was already on a bus to Ayodhya, hood pulled low, camera bag strapped tight, flash drive clutched like a weapon.
He had one goal now:
Expose them. One by one.
The Burning Silence
Ayodhya shimmered in the early light, cloaked in the scent of incense and old promises. As Ayaan stepped off the bus, he melted into the stream of pilgrims, tourists, and locals. No one looked twice at the man in a grey hoodie and tinted glasses, clutching a backpack like a sacred offering.
He walked quickly, avoiding the cameras near the Ram Mandir site and choosing back lanes where buffaloes outnumbered people. His destination wasn’t the temple, but a print shop tucked behind the vegetable market—Sharma Digital Press. It looked abandoned, with a flickering neon sign and a closed shutter. But Ayaan knocked three times, waited, then knocked twice again.
The door creaked open.
Inside, under stacks of unused election posters and old calendars, sat Tanisha Verma.
She didn’t rise. Just stared. “I saw your obituary on Twitter.”
“I had to die,” Ayaan replied. “Too many people wanted me to.”
“You brought them here, didn’t you?” she said, voice sharp. “You lit the match in Dhaulpur, and now Ayodhya’s next?”
“I didn’t light anything,” he said. “They set the fire. I just refused to look away.”
Tanisha sighed, then motioned him in. “Fine. But don’t talk loud. There’s a man across the street who asks too many questions.”
Tanisha had been an election data analyst once. Then a whistleblower. Now she lived in the shadows, surviving on freelance design jobs and encrypted messages.
Ayaan slid the flash drive across the desk. “I need a clean copy. One you can’t trace back to me.”
She plugged it in.
Within seconds, her brows furrowed. “What is this?”
“Land scams. Procurement deals. A politician named Raghunandan Mishra. And someone worse—someone called Baba.”
Tanisha clicked open a folder labeled “B-3: Internal Transfers.” It contained scanned letters—orders for transfers of IAS officers, police chiefs, even teachers. All linked to districts where government land had been reclassified. Always in favor of private firms. Always with the same fake seal.
“Baba,” she muttered, “isn’t just a man. He’s a system.”
Ayaan nodded. “Then we break the system.”
“You don’t break it,” she whispered. “You expose it. Bit by bit. Otherwise, it swallows you.”
Meanwhile, in Lucknow, chaos brewed behind closed doors.
MLA Mishra had called an emergency meeting at a farmhouse under heavy security. He arrived with a bruised ego and a bruised lip—rumors said Baba’s men had ‘disciplined’ him for his loose ends.
At the long teakwood table sat men from every corner of the power map—contractors, middlemen, media liaisons, and one Central Minister’s private secretary.
“We have a problem,” Mishra began.
“No,” said a man with a clean-shaven head and gold-rimmed glasses. “You had a problem. Now we all do.”
“The boy is dead,” Mishra snapped.
The secretary placed a file on the table. “Is he?”
Inside were photos. Ayaan at a Ghazipur tea stall. A blurry image near Ayodhya station. And a satellite grab from a surveillance drone—of him entering Sharma Digital Press.
Mishra paled. “Then who died in the hotel?”
“Someone else. Planted. You were sloppy.”
Baba’s voice echoed from a hidden speaker on the wall.
“Enough,” he said. Calm, measured. “The next move must come from us. Not him. Plant a story. Discredit him. Drag his name through the mud. And if he speaks again, silence him.”
Ayaan didn’t know they were watching already.
He worked through the afternoon, drawing red lines across a giant map Tanisha printed for him. Each point represented a district with similar land-grab patterns. They followed a corridor from Gorakhpur to Chitrakoot—always close to proposed expressway routes, always tied to the same companies.
It wasn’t greed. It was strategy. Real estate wasn’t the goal. Control was.
“They’re preparing for something big,” Ayaan said.
Tanisha hesitated. “Election realignment?”
“Maybe,” he said. “Or private infrastructure to control public resources.”
She picked up a file marked “Bharti – 2024” and handed it to Ayaan. “This was sent to me two months ago. Ramveer knew he was being watched. He believed someone inside the Election Commission was feeding voter data to these firms—so they could manipulate welfare rollouts district by district.”
Ayaan rubbed his temples. “It’s a state-sponsored shadow government.”
“No,” Tanisha said, eyes narrowing. “It’s a state within the state.”
The next morning, the local newspaper carried a headline:
“Journalist-Turned-Extremist Linked to Fake Land Scam Files”
A photo of Ayaan—taken from a college seminar five years ago—was printed below the headline. The article cited unnamed sources claiming he had forged Bharti’s documents and was now using “sympathy and lies” to gain political influence.
It was signed: R. Tiwari, Editor, Eastern Voice Daily.
Ayaan clenched the paper. “They’re fast.”
“They’re scared,” Tanisha said.
“They’re also getting close.”
That night, a rock crashed through the window of Sharma Digital Press.
Inside the bundle was a note:
“Go back to Delhi. Or next time, it won’t be a rock.”
Tanisha laughed bitterly. “They really want you out of here.”
“Then I’m staying.”
Ayaan knew what had to be done.
He pulled out his camera, set up his mic, and looked directly into the lens.
“My name is Ayaan Khan. I am a journalist. And if you’re watching this, it means I’m still alive. Or it means I died trying to tell you the truth.”
He hit record.
The Shadow Manifesto
The video went live at 9:01 p.m.
Titled “They’re Stealing Uttar Pradesh”, it began with Ayaan sitting in a dimly lit room, flanked by a map and photocopied documents taped to the wall. His voice was calm but piercing. For twenty-two minutes, he laid out a trail of corruption so complex and vast it made even veteran journalists pause mid-sentence.
He spoke of Bharti’s death, of forged land deeds, of front companies and ghost contractors. He named names—carefully but deliberately. Raghunandan Mishra. Omkar Holdings. District collectors who had quietly moved abroad. Then, finally, he mentioned a name no one dared to say aloud:
“Baba,” he said, “is not a myth. He is a man who lives in your silence.”
Within two hours, the video crossed 500,000 views.
By morning, it was trending on every major platform. The state government issued a statement: “Baseless accusations from a mentally unstable fugitive.” But the damage was done. Screenshots flooded WhatsApp groups. A new wave of protests began in Jaunpur. Students blocked trains in Ballia. A women’s collective in Rae Bareli filed an RTI demanding details of land transfers between 2019 and 2023.
And in a bunker beneath an ashram near Varanasi, Baba watched it all with his fingers steepled under his chin.
“His voice is louder than we anticipated,” he said.
At Sharma Digital Press, Tanisha was moving fast. “We have 72 hours before they send someone again,” she muttered. “Maybe less.”
Ayaan was back on the floor, sorting through old government memos and affidavits. The response had shocked him. Not the popularity—he had expected some noise—but the fearless response from ordinary people. As if everyone had been waiting for someone to scream first.
But it was also a ticking clock.
“The next step?” Tanisha asked.
“We reveal the manifesto,” Ayaan said.
She frowned. “What manifesto?”
“The one they’re working from,” Ayaan replied. “This isn’t random corruption. This is ideological. It’s a blueprint for control.”
He dug out a folder marked “Project Shuddhikaran.”
It was originally filed as a public sanitation initiative. But the documents showed vast land reallocations near minority settlements, all sold to private trusts. Then came school curriculum changes, followed by local policing reforms. All in districts previously neutral during state elections.
“It’s not just land,” Ayaan whispered. “It’s identity engineering. They’re redrawing communities.”
In Lucknow, the Chief Minister’s media advisor barged into Mishra’s office.
“Have you seen this?” he shouted, tossing a printed transcript of Ayaan’s video.
Mishra didn’t look up. “I’m aware.”
“Then do something! You let a dead man become a martyr. Now the whole state is watching this like a Netflix show!”
Mishra slammed his glass on the desk. “What do you suggest? Kill him again? That didn’t work last time.”
The advisor’s voice dropped. “Baba wants him silenced. Not erased. Discredited. Expose something on him. A scandal. A family weakness.”
Mishra’s eyes gleamed. “He’s from Lucknow, isn’t he? Muslim boy. Father was a government clerk?”
The advisor nodded. “Retired early. Rumors of embezzlement.”
Mishra grinned. “Now that’s a start.”
That evening, a new story broke on a local Hindi news channel.
“Ayaan Khan’s Father Accused of Defrauding Public Funds in 2009”
It was old. The case had been dismissed. But the anchor spat the words like venom. “Is this the legacy of our so-called truth-teller?” he shouted, waving a file full of nothing.
Ayaan watched the footage from Tanisha’s laptop. “They’re digging deep,” he murmured.
“Your father?” she asked.
“Innocent,” Ayaan said. “But the stain was enough to ruin his pension.”
He stood slowly. “They want to break me from within.”
“But they miscalculated,” Tanisha replied. “You have nothing left to lose.”
The final blow came at midnight.
Tanisha’s phone buzzed with a notification:
Ayaan Khan charged with inciting communal unrest under IPC Section 153A.
“He’s now a wanted man,” she whispered.
They knew what that meant. Any cop, any checkpoint, any night raid—could end him. It wasn’t about arrest. It was about silencing.
Ayaan pulled on his jacket. “I need to disappear again. But not before the next video.”
Tanisha grabbed his wrist. “Where will you go?”
“To the heart of the machine,” he said. “Ghazipur. That’s where it all began.”
In the town of Ghazipur, deep in the eastern plains, a schoolteacher named Devashish Rao opened his inbox.
He clicked on an email with no subject. Inside was a single line:
“A storm is coming. Be ready to speak.”
Attached was a folder marked “Operation Mandala.”
Devashish closed his laptop, looked out the window at the moonlit fields, and whispered, “Let it come.”
Operation Mandala
The road to Ghazipur was mostly unlit, a ribbon of cracked asphalt winding through sleeping villages and restless silence. Ayaan sat beside the window of a private bus, hoodie up, face turned away from the lone tube light flickering above the driver. The bus smelled of diesel and damp sacks. He clutched a small duffel bag—inside, his backups, a power bank, a hard copy of land transfer data, and the flash drive Tanisha had encrypted.
Each time the bus slowed, he tensed.
He wasn’t just avoiding the police anymore. After the Section 153A charge, he had officially crossed the line from whistleblower to fugitive agitator. Any arrest now would be a public lesson.
By the time the bus pulled into Ghazipur’s dusty terminal, the eastern sky had turned from black to blue. It was 5:14 a.m.
Ayaan didn’t go home. He hadn’t seen his parents in two years, and now wasn’t the time to invite danger to their doorstep. Instead, he slipped through narrow lanes until he reached a dilapidated house on the outskirts. The door was opened by Devashish Rao—retired schoolteacher, activist, and former aide to Ramveer Bharti during his student union days.
“I wondered when you’d come,” Devashish said, no emotion in his voice.
“You got the file?” Ayaan asked.
“Mandala,” Devashish nodded. “Come in.”
The file was thin but explosive.
Operation Mandala was a codeword used by senior bureaucrats starting in 2018. It referred to a phased plan: targeting economically weaker districts, quietly acquiring government or tribal land through legal loopholes, and converting them into “zones of development priority”—a phrase that masked large-scale resource extraction, surveillance setups, and vote bank manipulation.
Each phase had political backing. And each phase ended with the transfer—or death—of a dissenting officer.
Ramveer Bharti had stumbled onto Phase IV just before he was shot.
Ayaan flipped through the list of locations. Ghazipur, Azamgarh, Mirzapur, Chandauli. All on the proposed freight corridor. All now swarming with private security forces under various “infrastructure partnerships.”
“These are military-style zones,” Ayaan murmured. “No media access. No audits.”
Devashish nodded. “We call it development. But it’s colonization.”
Meanwhile, in a farmhouse outside Varanasi, Baba listened to the updates in silence.
“His video has reached international journalists now,” one aide said nervously. “A group in Geneva wants to ‘observe’ UP’s election process.”
Another man added, “We’ve begun discrediting his allies—Tanisha’s accounts are under audit. Her brother was questioned by the ATS.”
Still, Baba said nothing.
Finally, he asked, “And Operation Mandala?”
“It’s been leaked,” the aide admitted. “But no one believes it yet. It looks too theatrical. Like a film plot.”
Baba smiled.
“Good,” he said. “Let them think it’s fiction. Until the ending becomes real.”
Ayaan and Devashish sat on the rooftop that night, eating stale rotis and raw onion.
“We need proof people can touch,” Ayaan said. “Not just files. Not just my words.”
Devashish lit a cigarette. “There’s an old warehouse. Outside Dildarnagar. Phase IV began there. You’ll find what they left behind.”
“What’s in it?”
“Ghosts,” the teacher said quietly. “Men who vanished after saying no.”
The next day, Ayaan traveled on foot.
He avoided checkpoints, crossed a dry canal, and followed the tracks toward the old warehouse. It stood like a corpse—windows smashed, tin roof rusted, paint peeling. But the gate was locked with fresh chains.
He used a rusted spanner to break through the back fence.
Inside, he found what he didn’t expect—records. Crates of them.
Stacks of voter ID duplicates. Aadhaar photocopies. Scanned caste certificates with altered surnames. Fake land purchase affidavits. Satellite maps. Field reports.
It wasn’t abandoned. It was a staging ground.
A faint click echoed behind him.
He turned.
A man stood there, gun raised.
“Mr. Khan,” he said coldly. “You’ve seen enough.”
But before the shot rang out, a loud voice interrupted: “Drop the weapon!”
Two locals emerged from the shadows—Devashish’s former students—holding metal rods.
The gunman turned, hesitated, and ran.
Ayaan exhaled, heart pounding.
The boys laughed. “Sir said you’d be dumb enough to come alone.”
Back in town, Ayaan secured the documents in a borrowed locker inside a dharamshala. Then he went live again.
“My name is Ayaan Khan,” he said. “And this is Operation Mandala.”
He showed the files. Page by page. Name by name. Date by date.
“We are not just being looted. We are being redesigned.”
This time, it wasn’t just students who marched. It was farmers. School teachers. Temple priests. Labor unions.
In Banda, a district magistrate resigned on live TV.
In Delhi, the Home Ministry called for a “fact-finding delegation.”
And somewhere near Prayagraj, a man known only as Baba whispered to his guards:
“Burn the field. Salt the ground. If he wants war, give him war.”
The Ground Beneath
The protest began as a trickle—thirty villagers, two schoolteachers, and a dozen students holding hand-painted placards. But by the time they reached the Collector’s office in Ghazipur, the crowd had swelled into the thousands. No party flags. No slogans of any particular faith. Just one chant, rising above the dust and fear:
“Who owns the land? We do!”
Ayaan watched from the rooftop of a tea shop across the street. Beside him, Devashish Rao held a pair of binoculars, scanning the perimeter. The Collector’s compound was already guarded by CRPF units, their black uniforms glinting under the harsh June sun.
“Too quiet,” Devashish said. “No water cannons yet. No lathis.”
“They’re waiting,” Ayaan replied. “Orders will come from higher up.”
And they did.
At precisely 11:03 a.m., a black SUV pulled up. Out stepped a man in a beige safari suit, sunglasses dark as night, earpiece looped around his neck.
Devashish froze. “That’s DCP Veerendra Singh. Baba’s enforcer.”
Down in the crowd, tensions simmered. The younger protestors pushed forward, shouting for justice, demanding an investigation into Operation Mandala. They had watched Ayaan’s videos. Some had memorized names. Others carried printouts of the forged land documents.
From the dais, the local SP took the mic. “We request all citizens to disperse peacefully,” he said in Awadhi-accented Hindi. “Law and order must be respected.”
No one moved.
Then DCP Veerendra stepped up, removed his glasses, and said:
“This protest has been infiltrated by anti-national elements.”
And just like that, the crackdown began.
Ayaan barely had time to switch on his camera. Tear gas shells burst in mid-air. Lathi charges tore through the crowd. Women were dragged. Students were thrown against walls. One boy, no older than fifteen, fell to the ground bleeding.
Devashish’s knuckles whitened as he gripped the railing. “They want to break them publicly. Humiliate them. So the next town stays silent.”
Ayaan livestreamed everything.
“We are in Ghazipur,” he said, coughing. “This is what truth looks like when it threatens power.”
Back in Delhi, thousands watched it unfold live. By evening, hashtags flooded social media:
#MandalaExposed
#WeStandWithAyaan
#GhazipurBurns
But for Baba, chaos was not failure—it was strategy.
In a temple-turned-safehouse in Prayagraj, he addressed his inner circle.
“We cannot silence him anymore,” he said. “But we can shift the ground beneath him.”
He outlined Phase V.
“Tomorrow, Ayaan Khan will be arrested under the National Security Act. Frame him as a foreign-funded insurgent. Link him to foreign NGOs. Claim he’s part of a digital misinformation ring.”
“But there’s no evidence,” one aide said.
“There will be,” Baba replied.
That night, Tanisha called Ayaan through a secure line.
“They’ve frozen my accounts,” she whispered. “My old landlord was picked up for ‘questioning.’ They’re coming after anyone linked to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “We knew this path would burn.”
“But you didn’t choose it,” Ayaan said. “I did.”
Tanisha paused. “I chose it the moment I sent you that first file.”
He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. “Then we stay in the fire together.”
Before hanging up, she added, “One more thing. I got an anonymous drop. Photos. Documents. Handwritten memos. Something called The Ground Project.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know yet. But it has Baba’s signature on it.”
At dawn, Ayaan returned to the dharamshala locker.
Inside was a manila envelope, sealed with wax. He opened it slowly.
It contained a list of land parcels, coordinates, and attached memos referencing environmental waivers, private militia training, and tactical surveillance drone orders.
This wasn’t just corruption.
This was militarization.
A private army, hidden in plain sight, funded through “development trusts” and foreign FCRA licenses. Baba wasn’t just manipulating elections. He was preparing for something darker.
Ayaan whispered to himself, “This isn’t about 2024. It’s about after.”
He clicked on his recorder.
“My name is Ayaan Khan. And if you think this ends with a vote, you’re wrong. This ends with control. Of land. Of identity. Of resistance itself.”
He hit upload.
But even before the video processed, a van screeched outside the dharamshala.
Boots. Radios crackling. Voices shouting his name.
Ayaan jumped from the back window, scaled a rain pipe, and ran through the narrow gullies of Ghazipur like a hunted animal.
He didn’t stop until he reached a sugarcane field on the town’s edge.
There, panting, hands shaking, he checked his phone.
“Uploading: 94%.”
Then the screen blacked out.
Battery dead.
And from behind the tall stalks, a voice said calmly:
“Don’t move.”
A cold barrel touched his neck.
The Disappeared
Ayaan didn’t breathe.
The gun barrel pressed against the base of his skull, firm and steady. Behind him, the sugarcane rustled, but there was no breeze. Just footsteps. Soft. Deliberate.
“I should shoot you now,” the voice said. Calm. Male. Educated.
“Then why haven’t you?” Ayaan whispered.
A pause. The barrel lowered.
“Because someone paid me not to.”
Ayaan turned slowly. The man was clean-shaven, late thirties, dressed in a civilian kurta and jeans, but his boots were unmistakably military. Intelligence. Off-the-record. Off-the-books.
“Who sent you?”
“Someone who thinks you still have work to do.”
Ayaan didn’t ask questions. He knew better. In Uttar Pradesh, favors came from ghosts, and gratitude was a dangerous emotion.
The man nodded toward a narrow path through the field. “Follow me. Quietly.”
They traveled on foot for nearly an hour, cutting through irrigation trenches, thorny bushes, and railway tracks. At the edge of a mango orchard, an old jeep waited. A woman was in the driver’s seat, scanning the treeline.
“Your name?” Ayaan asked her.
She didn’t look at him. “Doesn’t matter.”
They drove west, away from Ghazipur, through forgotten roads no Google map would show. Around midnight, they arrived at a crumbling haveli hidden behind banyan trees and overgrowth.
Inside, a single bulb flickered above a desk covered in maps, files, and a typewriter.
The man handed Ayaan a folder. “Read.”
It was a dossier titled “The Disappeared”.
The file listed 34 names.
Bureaucrats. Activists. Local journalists. All from Eastern UP. All declared either “missing,” “absconding,” or “dead by suicide.” None had criminal records. But all had one thing in common—they had questioned Project Mandala or filed RTIs against the land reclassification committees.
Ayaan ran his fingers over the names.
One stopped him cold.
“Dr. Zubair Khan – Scholar, Environmental Historian – Last seen: May 2022”
His father.
He stood abruptly, voice cracking. “This is fake. My father died of a heart attack.”
The man didn’t blink. “Did you see the body?”
Ayaan’s mouth went dry. “They cremated him quickly. I wasn’t in town…”
The woman at the desk looked up. “Check the QR on the last page.”
Ayaan scanned it. It led to an archived video—grainy CCTV footage from a government building in Lucknow, dated two weeks after his father’s supposed death.
Zubair Khan. Alive. Entering Room 4B of the Urban Development Ministry.
And never coming out.
Ayaan sank into a chair.
“He tried to stop them too,” the man said. “They buried him in silence.”
In the farmhouse near Prayagraj, Baba stood before a small idol of Shiva and whispered, “Even the truth bleeds.”
Mishra stood behind him, sweating.
“We have Khan surrounded. We almost had him.”
“Almost,” Baba said, sipping tea. “But not quite.”
He turned. “Do you know what happens when martyrs multiply?”
Mishra said nothing.
Baba smiled. “They become legends. And legends are harder to kill.”
Back in the haveli, Ayaan couldn’t sleep. He stared at the walls—lined with names, timelines, maps, like a war bunker from some lost revolution.
The woman brought him tea. “We’re not rebels,” she said quietly. “We’re archivists. We preserve what they erase.”
He sipped silently. “Why help me now?”
“Because you’re loud. And people are listening.”
She handed him another folder. “We’ve traced Baba’s financial trail. Offshore accounts. Gold imports labeled as temple donations. He’s using religion as camouflage.”
Ayaan shook his head. “It’s not enough. People need to see the faces.”
She slid over a packet. Inside—passport-sized photos. DCPs, MLAs, IAS officers. Each with red string linking them to projects, districts, contracts.
“Show them this,” she said. “Before they take your voice too.”
At 4 a.m., Ayaan sat under a neem tree and recorded his next message.
“My father didn’t die of a heart attack. He disappeared like so many others. They told us we were crazy. Conspiracy theorists. But this is not a theory. This is a machine.”
He showed the file. The names. The links.
“I am not alone anymore. And neither are you.”
He uploaded the video using a satellite uplink.
By noon, the country exploded.
TV anchors fumbled to spin stories. WhatsApp groups in dozens of languages debated it all. Hundreds of RTIs were filed overnight. Protests resumed in Ayodhya, Basti, and Ballia. Lawyers offered pro bono services. A PIL reached the Supreme Court.
And someone hacked the Eastern Voice Daily’s website—replacing it with a single sentence:
“How many more will you disappear?”
But as the nation stirred, Ayaan remained hidden.
The woman came to him with fresh clothes.
“You’ll need a disguise,” she said. “They’ve released a reward for your arrest—25 lakh rupees.”
Ayaan stared into the mirror.
He didn’t see a journalist anymore.
He saw a man made of smoke and rage.
“I won’t run,” he said. “I’ll go to Lucknow.”
“Suicide,” the man warned.
“No,” Ayaan replied. “Revolution.”
Lucknow Underground
Lucknow. The city of nawabs and narrow alleys, of ancient grace and fresh blood.
By the time Ayaan stepped into the old part of the city, his face was hidden behind a beard, his eyes shielded by cracked glasses, and his ID read Ashraf Malik – Social Worker, Aligarh. He moved through the shadows of Chowk like a ghost trailing memory, passing kebab stalls, cycle repairmen, and saffron flags fluttering above cracked balconies.
Lucknow was quieter than Ghazipur, but the quiet had changed. It wasn’t peace. It was anticipation. Something was gathering—like breath before a storm.
He was led through a spice warehouse and down into a basement that smelled of damp books and resistance. At the far end sat an elderly man with a chessboard, moving pieces with slow precision. His name was Aftab Rizvi—retired judge, now the invisible thread behind dozens of legal petitions challenging Operation Mandala.
He didn’t rise. Just pointed to the black queen.
“You play?”
Ayaan shook his head. “Not anymore.”
“Shame,” Aftab said, moving a knight. “You would’ve been good at it. Always thinking three moves ahead.”
Ayaan dropped a folder onto the table. “They killed my father.”
Aftab didn’t blink. “Then you understand the game now.”
The basement was the hub of what the underground called The People’s Circuit—a loose, encrypted network of ex-bureaucrats, data analysts, court clerks, and young lawyers. Not revolutionaries, not radicals. Just people who refused to forget.
Tanisha had already been in touch with them, uploading documents through firewalled drives, fragmenting the trail so no one source carried the whole truth.
But the next phase was different.
“Files don’t scare them anymore,” Ayaan said. “We need the courts. We need the public. Simultaneously.”
Aftab smiled. “Then you’ll need something real.”
He slid a brown envelope across the table.
Inside: photos of a farmhouse. Surveillance stills. Interior shots. And one picture of Baba himself, standing before a digital projector, mid-speech.
“This was taken two weeks ago,” Aftab said. “The location is in Rae Bareli. No police access. Officially marked as a monastery. Unofficially—it’s their war room.”
Ayaan’s hands trembled. “How did you get this?”
“Ghosts have cameras,” Aftab replied. “And Baba has begun to slip. His arrogance is becoming expensive.”
That night, Ayaan and a junior coder named Ravi set up a digital strike.
They hacked into government procurement logs and created a live, interactive map of land transfer anomalies. Each dot could be clicked—pulling up documents, dates, and beneficiaries. It was ugly. Raw. But honest.
Then, they embedded it into a website: www.redcorridortruth.in
Ayaan filmed a new message, short and fierce.
“No more whispers. No more waiting. Here is the truth. Take it.”
When the site launched the next morning, it crashed in under four minutes from traffic overload.
By 10 a.m., twenty-five thousand people had accessed the map.
By noon, thirty-five lakh.
At a press conference in Lucknow, the Home Minister smirked on live TV.
“There is no such thing as Operation Mandala,” he said. “And Ayaan Khan is not a journalist. He is a digital criminal backed by foreign agencies.”
One reporter dared to ask, “Then why is your own Land Reform Committee chairperson listed in the documents?”
The smile faded.
The mic cut.
The feed stopped.
Back in the Rae Bareli farmhouse, Baba watched the silence spread like ink.
He turned to Mishra. “He’s drawing too much blood now.”
Mishra looked haggard. “We can’t track him. His IPs jump from Kanpur to Bhutan in seconds.”
“Then don’t chase him,” Baba said. “Lure him.”
He pulled out a newspaper. On the front page: a headline.
“Zubair Khan Alive? Intelligence denies report.”
Ayaan saw it too.
The trap was set.
Tanisha called.
“They want you to come looking.”
“I know.”
“They’ll kill you.”
“Then I’ll die with my father’s name on my tongue.”
She paused. “You’re not alone.”
Ayaan packed only what he needed—camera, backup drive, a worn copy of his father’s book History and Hunger: Land Wars of the Hindi Belt. On the inside page, he scribbled a line in pen:
“For Zubair. And all the disappeared.”
At dawn, he left Lucknow in a borrowed jeep. The roads were empty. But in the distance, smoke rose from a burnt village where land was “acquired” the week before.
As he drove, a message pinged on his burner phone.
Unknown Number: Rae Bareli. Monastery gate. Midnight. Bring the truth.
Ayaan smiled faintly.
“I never travel empty-handed.”
The Gate of Ashes
The road to Rae Bareli was unmarked and mostly forgotten, winding through fields that had once been farms but now lay barren under barbed wire. The signboard at the edge of the village read simply:
“Spiritual Healing Centre – Entry by Appointment Only”
But the villagers called it something else.
“The Gate of Ashes.”
Where voices went in, but none ever came out.
At 11:49 p.m., Ayaan parked the borrowed jeep by an abandoned mill, his face hidden under a shawl, the hard drive taped to the inside of his thigh. The moon hung low, casting pale silver over the fields. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked once—and then went silent.
He walked slowly toward the gate. Two guards waited, rifles across their chests. They didn’t ask his name. They simply opened the metal gate and let him in.
As he stepped through, the gate shut behind him with a mechanical finality.
No turning back.
Inside, the compound looked more like a tech lab than a monastery. Whitewashed walls. CCTVs at every corner. Satellite dishes mounted on bamboo poles. And silence so thick it rang in the ears.
A young man with a clipboard met him halfway down the path. “Mr. Khan,” he said. “This way.”
Ayaan followed him through a corridor lined with quotes painted in Sanskrit. “Truth is an illusion crafted by the powerful.” One wall read: “History is a controlled demolition.”
He was led into a small, soundproof room. One chair. One table. And one man waiting in the shadows.
Baba.
The face was softer than Ayaan imagined. No rage. No scars. Just serenity—like a guru after morning meditation. But the eyes gave it away. Eyes that didn’t blink when people disappeared.
“You’ve come far,” Baba said, gesturing to the chair.
“I’ve come for the truth,” Ayaan replied, not sitting.
“Still chasing fairy tales?”
“No,” Ayaan said. “I’m ending one.”
Baba chuckled. “Then let me tell you mine.”
He spoke like a storyteller—calm, patient, unnervingly warm.
“How does one rule a land as chaotic as India?” he asked. “Through fear? No. Too loud. Through elections? No. Too slow. You rule it by rewriting the land.”
He explained Project Mandala not as corruption—but as “reclamation.”
“They took our temples, our rivers, our language. Now we take back the soil. Quietly. Legally. Permanently.”
Ayaan remained silent.
Baba leaned in. “Your father tried to stop me. He had a brilliant mind. And a tragic weakness—hope.”
“You killed him.”
“I made him vanish,” Baba corrected. “But even then, he wouldn’t break. So I let him live—in a room of silence.”
Ayaan’s blood ran cold.
“He’s here?”
Baba smiled. “Alive, yes. But lost.”
They led Ayaan through another corridor, this one colder.
Cells lined the walls. Not dungeons—more like sterile chambers. Each one identical. A cot. A toilet. A bulb. And a glass door that locked from the outside.
At the third door on the right, they stopped.
Zubair Khan sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes half-open, whispering something into his palms.
Ayaan staggered forward.
“Baba…”
The door slid open.
Zubair didn’t recognize him. His eyes didn’t blink. But his lips kept moving, repeating a single phrase:
“Land remembers. Land remembers.”
Ayaan fell to his knees.
“You broke him.”
Baba’s voice came from behind. “He broke himself. All I did was give him silence.”
Ayaan turned, fury rising. “You think you can control truth by locking it up?”
“I don’t need to control truth,” Baba said softly. “I just need to delay it. A day. A month. A lifetime.”
But Baba had miscalculated one thing.
Ayaan wasn’t alone anymore.
Outside the compound, as midnight struck, over a thousand villagers gathered at the outer gate. Word had spread—via burner phones, signal flares, and one final broadcast Tanisha had scheduled at 11:45:
“If I don’t return by dawn, come find me. Come loud. Come many.”
And they did.
Mothers with sticks. Boys with lathis. Farmers with iron rods. And among them—Ravi, Devashish, even Aftab in a wheelchair, holding a court order signed under emergency powers.
Inside the compound, alarms began to shriek.
Baba’s smile faded.
“You thought they would come for you?”
Ayaan rose.
“No,” he said. “They came for everyone you erased.”
The gates burst open.
The people poured in—not to burn, but to witness.
Phones rose in the air, cameras recording every crack in the lie.
Zubair Khan was carried out, wrapped in a shawl. Other prisoners followed—journalists, clerks, tribal leaders. The disappeared, returned.
And in the center of the crowd, Ayaan stood tall, holding a mic to Baba’s face.
“Any last words?”
Baba looked around—finally cornered, not by law, but by truth.
Then, softly:
“You’ll never understand power.”
Ayaan leaned in.
“Maybe not. But I understand history. And it begins again tonight.”
The Trial
The courtroom was packed beyond capacity.
Outside, the streets of Lucknow buzzed with thousands gathered around LED screens set up by student unions and citizen volunteers. Inside, under the golden dome of the High Court, the case titled “Ayaan Khan vs. State of Uttar Pradesh” began. But it wasn’t just a trial. It was a reckoning.
On the left bench sat the state’s Special Prosecutor, flanked by uniformed officers and bureaucrats in muted tones. On the right, Ayaan, in a simple kurta, sat beside Aftab Rizvi and Tanisha Verma, both acting as civilian legal aides. Behind him were the families of the disappeared, each holding a black-and-white photograph. And in the press box, the eyes of the nation.
The Chief Justice entered.
“All rise.”
History held its breath.
The prosecution struck first.
They painted Ayaan as a threat to national security—an opportunist using half-baked documents and doctored footage to destabilize democracy. They called him a “digital anarchist,” suggested foreign NGO funding, even referenced old cases involving his father.
But Ayaan remained silent.
Because he knew what was coming next.
Aftab rose slowly, papers in hand.
“Your Honour,” he began, “truth has no echo chamber. It simply waits. Patiently. Until it can no longer be ignored.”
He submitted the hard drive.
Inside it: every phase of Operation Mandala. Satellite images, notarized land thefts, biometric ID manipulation, video testimonies from whistleblowers—including one live video of Zubair Khan, now recovering, confirming his abduction.
The courtroom gasped.
“This is not a conspiracy theory,” Aftab said. “This is a crime too large for a single law to contain.
The defense faltered. The crowd outside cheered when the first IAS officer was named. Then came photos of Baba’s secret compound, presented by the Central Forensic Team now forced to act after international pressure. Even UN rapporteurs had begun asking questions.
The final blow came from Ravi.
The young coder presented a live demo of the Red Corridor Map. The interactive tool showed real-time updates of new land acquisitions, blinking like a warning across the courtroom screen.
“Every point you see here,” Ravi said, voice shaking, “was once someone’s home, someone’s farm, someone’s story.”
Baba didn’t appear in court.
He had been placed under house arrest by a special directive of the Supreme Court pending criminal investigation, his assets frozen, his “spiritual center” sealed. But everyone knew: if this ended cleanly, it wouldn’t end at all.
The Chief Justice reviewed the files late into the evening.
Then, at 6:43 p.m., she passed the order.
“The court acknowledges a systemic abuse of land, identity, and legal power under the so-called Operation Mandala. A Special Investigation Tribunal shall be set up immediately. All whistleblowers to receive protection. All detainees to be released. All false charges against Mr. Ayaan Khan to be quashed with immediate effect.”
There was no applause inside the courtroom.
But outside, the streets roared like a tidal wave.
Ayaan looked down at his palms.
He felt nothing.
Just exhaustion. And the hum of unfinished work.
That night, he returned to the dharamshala rooftop in Ghazipur. The stars were out, blinking behind smoke trails and city haze. Tanisha sat beside him, sipping chai.
“You did it,” she said.
“No,” he replied. “We started it.”
She smiled faintly. “Do you know what day it is?”
He shook his head.
“Exactly one year since Bharti was killed.”
Silence.
Then Ayaan said, “He should be here. Speaking. Not me.”
Tanisha placed a small notebook on his lap.
It was Bharti’s. Found in the farmhouse. Pages filled with ink and hope.
On the last page, scribbled in pencil:
“Truth may not win the vote. But it will survive the verdict.”
Ayaan closed the notebook.
And for the first time in weeks—
He slept.
The New Map
Six months later, the monsoon arrived early in Uttar Pradesh.
In Ghazipur, the rain washed over parched land and broken signboards, over boundary walls erected on stolen soil. Water dripped from the eaves of the district collectorate, where a new nameplate now read: “Land Accountability Tribunal – Eastern Zone.” Ayaan stood outside in the drizzle, watching it quietly.
Inside, clerks filed affidavits on behalf of farmers who had once been branded illegal encroachers. Young paralegals trained by Tanisha now assisted villagers in navigating deeds and title disputes. Devashish, despite his age, had returned to teaching—this time land law, in a rented classroom funded by donations.
Change was slow.
But it had begun.
Ayaan had refused television interviews. He’d turned down awards. He no longer needed recognition. The story had never been about him. He spent his days traveling—between Bareilly, Basti, Azamgarh—documenting fresh violations, tracing new shells of Project Mandala as it mutated under new names.
But now he had allies.
The People’s Circuit had grown—coders, journalists, archivists, even retired police. They worked through anonymous drops, open-source tools, and community forums. Every exposed scam brought a small win. One more eviction reversed. One more arrested protestor acquitted.
And the map on Ayaan’s laptop, once a sea of red, now flickered with points marked in green:
“Restored.”
“Returned.”
“Resisted.”
Zubair Khan lived quietly now, in a small house near Barabanki. He remembered Ayaan sometimes. On other days, he sat in the garden, whispering to the plants. The trauma had loosened something in him, but he smiled more. And whenever he saw a news report about land rights, he mumbled:
“The soil remembers.”
Ayaan visited him every week.
Once, Zubair asked, “Did I leave anything behind?”
Ayaan pulled out the same book—History and Hunger—and handed it to him.
On the flyleaf, he’d added one line in his father’s handwriting, recovered from a government notepad:
“The land cannot speak. So we must.”
In a dark cell near Prayagraj, Baba sat on a wooden cot, staring at the wall. The court cases had piled up. Witnesses were now speaking freely. His networks were crumbling. But he wasn’t afraid. Just…quiet.
One day, a new inmate asked, “What were you trying to build?”
Baba looked up, eyes clouded.
“Not an empire,” he said. “A silence too big to break.”
The boy didn’t understand.
But history would.
In Lucknow, the Chief Justice retired early and wrote a memoir titled “The Verdict of the Voiceless.” In Delhi, a proposed amendment to the Land Acquisition Act was halted after massive protests—led by students in UP.
And in Rae Bareli, the old monastery compound was converted into a public archive. Every name of the disappeared was etched on its walls.
Above the gate, one line carved in Hindi:
“Yaad raho, kisne kiski mitti cheeni thi.”
“Remember who stole whose soil.”
Ayaan sat by the Ganga one morning, feet in the water, camera beside him.
He opened a fresh notebook.
Wrote one sentence:
“This is no longer the Red Corridor. This is the People’s Map.”
Then, he clicked record.
“My name is Ayaan Khan,” he said. “And this is the story we wrote together. With fear. With fire. With truth.”
The water rippled behind him.
And somewhere far off, across the state, the land finally exhaled.
END
