Khopira (Bihar): In Bihar’s Khopira village – where Dalits and people from Other Backward Classes (OBC) won the right to vote denied them by Upper Caste landlords after long and bloody struggles – the Election Commission of India’s (ECI’s) Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise may end up disenfranchising the poor.Eight Muslims from three separate families in Khopira were declared ‘traceless’ under the SIR and their names deleted from the draft electoral roll published on August 1. All three families have filed complaints with Bhojpur district election officials regarding the deletions, asking for the names to be added to the voter list.The Wire visited two of the three families in Khopira to assess how SIR is resulting in deletions of genuine voters in Bihar.Five members of one family deleted from electoral rollOne of the complaints was filed by Intaf Ansari. Ansari states in the complaint that his name, along with four of his family members has been deleted from the electoral roll. The other four are Shabnam Khatoon (wife of Intaf), Imtiyaz Ansari (brother of Intaf) and his wife Nasima Begum and Nasima’s sister Afsana Begum.All five have their votes registered at their address in Khopira village, which falls under Agiaon assembly constituency.When The Wire visited their one-storey home in the Muslim tola of Khopira Minhaz Ansari, Intaf’s nephew, answered the door. He said that the four of the five members had migrated to Pune for employment, although they visit Bihar to vote and had done so in the 2024 general election.The fifth, Afsana Begum, lives in Bihar at another location. Minhaz filled their SIR forms, but failed to submit it to the BLO, as a result of which their names were cut from the rolls. However, Minhaz claims that the BLO didn’t verify their status with a house visit before declaring them traceless. The BLO has told Minhaz to fill and submit the Election Commission’s Form 6 to add the five members. Form 6 is for new voter registrations.The second family The Wire visited is also called Ansari, who live in the same tola. Brothers Nasim and Sikandar’s names have been deleted as they were found to be ‘traceless’, despite their forms being submitted to the BLO along with their Aadhar and voter ID cards before July 26.When The Wire visited their home Nasim Ansari was present. There are eight voting members in the family and the other six found their names in the draft list. Sikandar submitted his form and went back to West Bengal, where he works. The BLO told the family that the deletions may be due to a technical mistake and asked them to submit form 6s.Nasim Ansari said that he would submit Aadhaar cards as proof. When told that Aadhaar is not included in the list of 11 documentary proofs he looked confused. Later, after The Wire’s visit to Ansari’s house, the Supreme Court directed the ECI on August 14 to include Aadhaar in list of accepted documentsThe patriarch of the family – Shamsuddin Ansari – is a mason and the other men in the family have migrated to West Bengal and Dubai in search of employment.The Wire was unable to visit the third person – also called Nasim Ansari – who had filed a complaint, but confirmed that his name had been deleted by checking his EPIC number in the Election Commission of India’s ‘Voter Helpline’ app. The complaint he has written states that he too was found to be ‘traceless’.The complaints were written and filed with the help of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation.Dalit family finds names of members struck offSimilarly, in the Dalit tola, two members of Punit Kumar’s family have had their names struck off. His wife Lakshmi Kumari and aunt Khushboo Kumari found their names missing from the draft list. Both women are 23 years old and got their voter ID cards made in March 2025. They applied for it in January 2025 and submitted their Aadhar cards as proof.Four months later they were told to submit documents afresh under SIR with the caveat that Aadhar was not valid. The BLO told Punit that their names were cut because they are newly registered voters. They have been asked to submit residence certificates along with Form 6s.Naval Kishore Singh, the BLO for booth number 197, one of the three booths in Khopira, said that all deletions had been because of non submission of forms. When asked about people being declared ‘traceless’ he maintained that proper procedure had been followed.Khopira is nestled among rice paddies and water canals. However, the placid countryside hides a disturbing past. The village is the birthplace of Brahmeshwar Singh, the founder of the Ranveer Sena, a dreaded Bhumihar militia that carried out horrific caste massacres.He was the Mukhiya [hence the sobriquet Bhramheshwar mukhiya] of Khopira in the 1980s, a period where landless tillers – Dften dalits and OBCs – were not only denied fair wages, but were subjected to humiliating diktats like not being allowed to sit on a cot when an Upper Caste person walked by, prevented from voting or riding a horse at weddings.With the help of Marxist-Leninist groups like Liberation and Peoples’ War, the subaltern castes organised and fought for their rights.The Ranveer Sena was formed in 1994 in Khopira and the nearby village of Belaur and soon embarked on a bloody rampage. Their ghastly acts include the Bathani tola massacre of 22 people in 1996 and the Lakshmanpur-bathe massacre of 68 dalits the year after. They were banned by the Bihar government. However, the legacy of that violent period is fresh in the memory of many people.“My father joined the Liberation party in the 1980s to fight for the rights of Dalits and I am a second generation party worker,” Dinesh said.“It was through a long and bloody struggle that we won our rights, including the right to exercise our franchise,” he added.The SIR exercise being conducted by the Election Commission is likely to roll back those hard won gains.Dinesh estimates that of the approximately 2,400 voters in Khopira village there have been 334 deletions, amounting to 14% of the electorate.Two decades of bloody strifeAzad Ram, the acting mukhiya of Khopira village was at his home when The Wire visited him. His wife is the actual mukhiya. He said that Khopira used to be a village dominated by upper caste Bhumihars. Bhrameshwar, his predecessor, owned 100 bighas of land and enforced caste hierarchy ruthlessly. In the early 1990s the Dalits fought back under the organisation of Liberation and other communist groupings.The stir turned violent and there were recriminations on both sides. Azad Ram and Dinesh maintain that killings of upper castes by Dalits were retaliatory in nature to violence instigated by Bhumihars. The Bhumihars responded by amalgamating smaller militias into the Ranveer Sena. What followed was two decades of bloody strife that ended with Brahmeshwar Singh’s assassination in 2012.Agiaon’s electoral history may shed some light on what the SIR is meant to achieve. It is one of seven assembly segments that fall under the Arrah lok sabha constituency and is a reserved seat. Dalits comprise 18.3% of the population.In 2010 the BJP’s Shivesh Ram won Agiaon and lost it to the Janata Dal (United)’s Prabhunath Prasad in 2015. In the 2020 Bihar elections the CPI (ML) Liberation’s Manoj Manzil won the seat with 86,327 votes, representing a solid 61.39% of the turnout. Manoj was born in a family of landless dalit brick kiln workers who were party cadre, and he himself organised a movement of school students protesting for better education facilities.However, an alleged 2015 murder rap caught up with him and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In the 2024 by election Liberation candidate Shiv Prakash Ranjan’s vote share dropped to 53% as the party retained the seat.The decade and a half since the creation of Agiaon assembly constituency has seen a shift from the Right to the Left. The SIR may result in the deletion of Dalit, Muslim and Yadav voters who favour the Mahagathbandhan and tilt the seat back to the Right.Read The Wire’s coverage of the Bihar SIR here.