Revolution Twenty20 Read online

  ‘Put them up in the front room,’ I said.

  We finished the move by ten in the morning. My first guest, I had planned, would be the person who made this possible – Shukla-ji. I had invited him for lunch. I hurried the hostel chef. The gas stove at my new home didn’t work, and the chef wanted to go to the hostel kitchen to prepare the dishes.

  ‘Bring the stove here!’ I shouted. ‘MLA sir is coming. I can’t trust the hostel cooking.’

  Of course, I also wanted Aarti to be one of my first guests. However, I had promised myself that Aarti would come to my new house as my girlfriend, not someone else’s girlfriend having a parallel affair with me.

  She SMSed me: ‘How’s the move gng? When do i c the place?’

  I replied: ‘U can come anytime but i won’t let u leave. Let me meet Raghav first.’

  ‘R u sure? Am so nervous about u meeting him.’

  I was composing a reply to her when my phone rang. I picked up Shukla-ji’s call.

  ‘Sir, we are making puris. Come hungry, okay?’ I said.

  ‘Come home, Gopal,’ he said.

  ‘I am home. My new home. I mean, this is also your home.’

  ‘I’m screwed,’ Shukla-ji said, his voice unusually tense.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come to my place. Your fucker friend, I won’t spare him. Come right now.’

  ‘What happened? We have lunch …’ I was saying but he cut the call.

  The chef arrived panting at my house, carrying the heavy stove on his shoulders.

  ‘It will take only an hour,’ he said reassuringly to me.

  ‘Lunch has been cancelled,’ I said and walked out of the house.

  My phone beeped. Another SMS from Aarti.

  ‘U should let me decorate the house. After all, hotel industry & all.’

  I sent her a smiley and kept the phone back in my pocket.

  ‘MLA Shukla’s place,’ I told the driver.

  MLA Shukla’s men stood in a circle in Shukla-ji’s verandah. They looked mournful, as if someone had just died. Pink-coloured papers lay strewn on the coffee table.

  ‘Where’s Shukla sir?’ I said.

  One of his party workers pointed to his office. ‘Wait here. He is on an important call,’ he said.

  ‘What happened?’ I said. The party worker did not respond. He looked pointedly at the pink papers. I picked one up.

  Revolution 2020, said the masthead, as pompous as ever. A miniature map of India, showing the so-called command centres of the revolution, was the logo.

  ‘MLA makes money by making holy river filthy!’ said the headline. A poor quality, black and white picture of Shukla-ji occupied a quarter of the page.

  ‘₹25 crores sanctioned for Dimnapura Sewage Treatment Plant. MLA pockets ₹20 crore,’ said the sub-headline.

  ‘These are all old, done to death, bullshit allegations, right?’ I said. Raghav liked to stir things up, but surely nobody would give a fuck about his rag.

  No one in the room responded to me. Half the party workers couldn’t read the paper anyway. The others seemed too scared to talk. I read on.

  Early Monday morning in Navabaga, a group of children walk towards their school waist-deep in sewage water. It is a gut-wrenching sight to see filthy water everywhere. Stink pervades the air. People of the neighbourhood don’t know what happened. They do know that this hadn’t happened before the government implemented the Ganga Action Plan (GAP). Yes, the same plan meant to clean up our holy river has ended up spreading more filth around our city.

  How? Well, because none of the projects meant to clean up the river were implemented. The Navabaga flooding apart, the river is filthier than ever. To give you an idea, the presence of fecal coliform, a form of bacteria, should not be more than 2,000 units/litre. At the ghats, the fecal coliform levels are 1,500,000 units/litre. Not only is our river dirty, we are living with serious health hazards.

  I saw Shukla-ji come out of his office. I rushed to him. He signalled me to wait and I saw that he was still on the phone. He picked up a few files and returned to the office. I continued to read.

  Revolution 2020 found many truths about the GAP scam. However, the most shocking one is about MLA Raman Lal Shukla’s Dimnapura Sewage Treatment Plant in Varanasi. Built at a cost of ₹25 crores, the plant remained dysfunctional for years. When finally made operational, it never cleaned the water. We have startling facts, with proof, on what happened inside the plant.

  ‘The opposition has done this,’ one party worker said to another. I sat down to finish the article.

  When untreated water reached the plant, eighty per cent of it was diverted downstream into the Varuna river, and dumped right back without any cleaning. The remaining twenty per cent of water was released at Dimnapura plant’s own exit, untreated. When the inspectors took the input and output measurements at points before and after the plant, it showed an eighty per cent drop in pollutants. Meanwhile, the water dumped into the Varuna river met the Ganga a few kilometres later. The net effect – no treatment of water at all and the river remaining as polluted as ever. Shukla took credit for the plant showing an eighty per cent drop in pollutants. The construction company, AlliedCon, is owned by the MLA’s uncle, Roshan Shukla, who made fake invoices for pumps that were never purchased (scans below).

  ‘We will kill this newspaper,’ a party worker whispered in my ear as he saw me read with such concentration.

  The bottom of the page had several images. These included fake invoices for pumps amounting to ₹15 crores. However, the actual site pictures showed no such pumps installed. A scanned letter from the pump manufacturer showed they never supplied the pumps. The ownership structure of AlliedCon confirmed links to Shukla-ji’s family. Finally, the paper had a picture of the Varuna river, with a dot to show the exact point where the effluents were released.

  ‘The CM is coming down from Lucknow,’ a party worker announced and worried murmurs rippled around the room.

  I could tell Raghav had worked hard on the story. He had suffered earlier for doing a story without evidence. This time he had left nothing to chance. The fake invoices, contractor-MLA link, and the audacity to dump the dirty water right back into the revered Ganga didn’t spell good news for Shukla-ji. Locals would be livid. A politician stealing is bad enough, but to rob from the holy river is the worst sin.

  ‘It’s not even a real newspaper,’ Shukla-ji’s PA was discussing the matter with someone. ‘Couple of thousand copies, nobody will pay attention to it.’

  The low circulation of Revolution 2020 had become the MLA’s only hope. Party workers had removed as many copies from the newsstands as they could. However, Revolution 2020 came free, like a brochure inside newspapers. It would be impossible to get rid of it completely.

  Aarti was calling. I stepped out to the lawns.

  ‘Saw R2020 today?’ she said. I didn’t know the paper had an acronym.

  ‘I have it in my hand,’ I said.

  She breathed audibly before she spoke again. ‘Is it too much?’ she said.

  I sneered, ‘It’s Raghav. When is he not too much?’

  ‘It is shocking, isn’t it? They dump the dirty water elsewhere in the river and claim to have cleaned it!’

  ‘He is taking on big people. He should be careful.’

  ‘But he is only speaking the truth. Someone has to stand up for the truth.’

  ‘I just said he needs to be careful,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want him to be in trouble,’ she said, scared.

  ‘He doesn’t like to stay out of it,’ I replied.

  ‘Is he in trouble?’ she said, pausing after every word.

  ‘How would I know?’ I said. I heard the noise of traffic outside the house.

  ‘C’mon, Gopal, you and MLA Shukla …’ she said and paused.

  ‘I’m not involved in any scam, okay?’ I screamed.

  Horns blared outside as I walked towards the gate.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ she said softly.