Mustard and paddy crops have come up on the mounds where once houses stood. Picture by Ashok Sinha

The tinderbox village that saw the first spark lit in a genocidal war 23 years ago was starving for want of a matchbox to light the ovens.

All two of the ovens, that is.

For two families are all that is left in Baghaura-Dalelchak, scene of the first massacre in Bihar’s long feud between the Maoists and the Ranvir Sena that raged for over a decade and cost hundreds of lives.

That bloodbath of May 29, 1987, when the Maoist Communist Centre slaughtered 54 Rajputs here — and the fiery reprisal by the upper castes the next morning — turned this hamlet into a ghost village.

Save for the 30 people — 15 adults and 15 children — who live there now.

One of them, Sheela Devi, 34, was desperately hoping this afternoon that her husband would remember to buy a matchbox at Madanpur, the town 7km away where he works as a labourer, before he left for home in the evening.

Else, there would be no dinner, and no lunch tomorrow, for them or their four young children. Even her neighbour Kulwatiya Devi, 60, had run out of matches and was waiting for her two sons to return from Madanpur with a matchbox.

With just two families, this village in southern Aurangabad district has no shops to buy matches or anything else from. “We have to walk 5km to Purnadih village to buy a matchbox, and 7km to Madanpur to buy kerosene,” says Sheela.

Baghaura-Dalelchak, in south Bihar’s Aurangabad district some 160km from Patna, is caught in a time warp, never able to exorcise the ghost of the massacre almost a quarter of a century ago.

At that time, Baghaura-Dalelchak was a lively village home to over 200 people from land-owning Rajput, Yadav, Pasi (toddy tapers), Kumhar (potters) and Ravidas (a Scheduled Caste) families.

The marauders selectively picked all the Rajputs — 80-year-old Sona Kunwar and her grandson, one-and-a-half-month-old Chhotu included — and then either hacked them to death or shot them in cold blood. Over 250 Maoists had surrounded the village from all sides and left it only after they were convinced that no Rajput — be it man, woman or child — was left.

The next morning, the village did not lack for matchsticks or kerosene. Enraged relatives and friends of the slain families came invading, kerosene containers in hand, and burnt down the houses belonging to Yadavs, Kumhars, Pasis and Ravidases in retaliation.

This was the first of the chain of massacres and counter-massacres involving the Maoists and the Ranvir Sena — the private army of the landlords — that has since bled the Gaya-Aurangabad-Jehanabad region.

The war, with the Maoists targeting the upper castes and the Sena the lower castes, claimed 368 lives in the region in the 1990s, including the infamous Laxmanpur-Bathe carnage in which 58 Dalits were killed in 1997.

Now the carnage has ebbed. The MCC is gone six years — it merged with the People’s War Group to form the CPI (Maoist). But those who fled Baghaura-Dalelchak never returned. Only the two families that had nowhere to go even in 1987 are sticking on, all the while dreaming of leaving one day.

And a matchbox remains at least a 5km walk away from the tinderbox village that saw the first spark lit in the war between the Maoists and the Ranvir Sena before dropping off the headlines.

Baghaura-Dalelchak emptied out long before “ethnic cleansing” became an international dirty word during the Bosnia war, lay forgotten through the rule of Satyendra Narayan Sinha, Jagannath Mishra, Lalu Prasad-Rabri Devi and Nitish Kumar.

It now lies ignored amid the elections, with no party or candidate having turned up even two days before the Rafiganj constituency, where this village lies, votes on Saturday.

“Why would politicians visit a village of only 15 voters?” said one of the eight women whom The Telegraph found in Baghaura-Dalelchak.

“How can they come, our village has no roads,” says Sheela.

After leaving the mud road from Madanpur, which is motorable only in the dry season, Baghaura-Dalelchak is a half-kilometre walk through a pagdandi — a footpath overgrown with thorny shrubs.

The village has no electricity, no school and no hospital either, at a time when development is on the upswing under Nitish Kumar’s rule.

Sheela, who is from the toddy tapper caste, was married to Joginder Choudhary 14 years ago. “When I learnt I was going to have to live in Baghaura-Dalelchak, a shudder ran thought me because of what I had heard about the village. But I had no way out,” she said.

Her sister-in-law Renu Devi, 27, looked petrified at the sight of The Telegraph team and hurried into one of the three mud-and-thatch homes where the two families live. No amount of cajoling could persuade her to come out or speak.

“We fear the sight of outsiders. Nobody ever visits us,” explains Kulwatiya, whose family is from the Ravidas caste.

Among the last visitors were the killers and the arsonists. The 250 Maoists had lined up almost all the Rajputs present in the village of 200-odd ---- from 80-year-old Sona Kunwar to one-and-a-half-month-old Chhotu ---- and shot or hacked them to death. Everybody else fled even before next day’s reprisal.

The Rajputs who escaped death now live in Aurangabad town or elsewhere. The Yadavs and Kumhars have mostly settled in neighbouring Laltenganj village.

Not that Lantenganj or the adjacent Jurahi village are any better off except in the matter of population. The entire area is under the sway of the Maoists, who have ensured that the “liberated zone” stays devoid of proper roads, electricity, schools and hospitals or any other “symbols of the state”.

The rebels, who live in the nearby hills and forests, have blocked the water of the local Koel canal at the source, says Sitaram Ravidas (name changed) of Jurahi. “If the canal were functioning, officials would come to monitor it.”

“After sunset, the rebels, armed with rifles and wearing olive green uniforms, move about freely. They describe themselves as our protectors but we hardly have anything they can guard for us,”

At Baghaura-Dalelchak, all the seven male residents were out on work at Madanpur or Aurangabad when this correspondent reached the village. The only man present was Kuleshwar Ravidas, 60, from Lantenganj who had come to inspect the mustard and paddy crops he has been growing on the abandoned farms as a bataidar (share-cropper).

By arrangement with some of the landowning families that have left the village, Kuleshwar grows crops on their land and shares the produce with them. The families of Sheela and Kulwatiya never had any land: the women now sometimes work for Kuleshwar.

At a short distance from Sheela’s home stands the brick house of Vinay Singh and Muneshwar Singh, like a tombstone.

The house, with a well that is still intact in the front yard, stands but all its 10 occupants were slaughtered that day in 1987. The rusted locks hang from the doors and the compound is overrun with weeds and bushes.

A plaque on the door shows the names of the dead, with 80-year-old Sona Kunwar’s on top and one-and-a-half-month-old Chhotu’s at the bottom. You have to strain your eyes to read the names and, after a few years, perhaps even the dead and their memories will disappear from Baghaura-Dalelchak.