Patna: A dispute over a poster claiming success in a competitive examination escalated into a police case, the arrest of a coaching centre owner and a search for another by Patna Police. On the night of June 2, ‘Khan Sir’ or Faisal Khan, who runs the coaching institute named Khan Global Studies, put up a poster that said 12,000 of his students had cleared a test to recruit 19,383 police constables. His centre is located on the same premises as Raushan Anand’s Gyan Bindu GS Academy, which is known for good results in Bihar police constable examinations and had claimed 10,000 of the selected candidates were its students.The poster appears to have taken the simmering competition between two institutes to the level of an altercation. An employee of Gyan Bindu GS Academy told The Wire, “The poster was pasted in a way that it has covered the signboard of Gyan Bindu.” He alleged that “it was done deliberately”. Thereafter, the Khan Global Studies poster was torn, allegedly on the same night, by supporters of the rival institute.Students enrolled at the centres also claimed that the Khan Global Studies office itself was attacked with stones and a guard on duty was beaten up. When The Wire visited the locality, a part of the main signboard of Khan Global Studies still lay broken. A trademark cut-out poster of Khan Sir on two other signboards had been removed. Khan Sir initially claimed shots were fired during the altercation, but later denied this happened. An employee of his institute approached the police with a complaint. The police arrested three Gyan Bindu employees, including owner Anand.Before his arrest, Anand claimed that the entire episode was a conspiracy against Gyan Bindu and himself. “A conspiracy has been hatched against me in connection with the Bihar Police exam results. Khan Sir and the owner of the cold storage facility are colluding in a concerted effort to ruin Gyan Bindu,” he told the media. The third enterprise operating out of the same premises is a cold storage facility.Immediately after the arrests, a video surfaced of two guards firing from their rifles at the same spot. A police officer at the Kadamkuan police station says, “We went to the spot with screenshots of the viral video and asked locals to identify [the shooters]. They identified them as Pradeep Kumar and Talebar Singh, the personal security guards of Khan Sir. We then took them to the police station and interrogated them.”The guards told police that they fired on Khan Sir’s order, who told them he would take care of whatever happened next. Both guards were arrested and a complaint was lodged against Khan Sir under the Arms Act.Cheek-by-jowl institutesGyan Bindu GS Academy and Khan Global Studies share the same main entrance gates (along with the cold storage unit).A coaching class in Musallahpur, June 2026. Photo: Umesh Kumar RayVarun, a teacher at Gyan Bindu, alleged that police were going slow on Khan Sir. He said, “An FIR was registered on June 4, and it is now June 7. Despite the FIR, he continues to conduct classes.”Khan Sir moved the civil court to secure interim bail. The court said on Tuesday (June 9) that investigators were free to question him in connection with the case but no coercive or punitive action, including arrest, were permitted. His lawyer Arvind Kumar Mahuar told The Wire, “The court has put a stay on his arrest until further orders. The next hearing will be on June 20.”Meanwhile, Anand didn’t get relief from the court on his bail plea. His lawyer Raghav Kumar said, “Whatever sections of Bhartiya Nyay Sanhita have been slapped against him are bailable, so he should have got bail.”What explains the bitter episode?While the poster may have been the immediate trigger for the clash on June 2, the constant competition among coaching institutes to attract more aspirants than the other lay at the root of the conflict, say locals.Patna is home to around 3,000 private coaching centres. Many of them are located Bhikna Pahari, Musallahpur, Bazar Samiti and Naya Tola areas, where students prepare for Railways, Bihar Police, government teaching posts and the Union Public Service Commission tests. Thousands of young aspirants live in these localities, sharing 10-by-10-foot rooms within congested alleys with no ventilation, limited access to electricity and shared toilet facilities.There is also no way to get actual data of how many aspirants of which coaching centre passed the examination for recruiting future police constables. This is because aspirants may attend classes at more than one coaching centre – Gyan Bindu and Khan Sir may be teaching overlapping batches of students. Only the overall data is available, provided by the Central Selection Boards of Constables, which recruits Bihar Police constables. On May 27, it announced a list of successful candidates for 19,383 posts.Dr Matiur Rahman Khan, popularly known as Guru Rahman, who has been running a coaching centre in Naya Tola for nearly two decades, says, “This is directly the result of a tug-of-war for aspirants between two coaching centres.” Rahman views this with concern, noting that it tarnishes the image of coaching institutes and negatively impacts the aspirants themselves. He says, “I have been teaching for more than two decades here, but this is the first time such a violent incident happened.”Deepak Kumar, who prepares aspirants for railway jobs in Musallahpur, remarks, “This incident has not only damaged the reputation of coaching teachers but has also dealt a blow to the image of Patna and Bihar.”“A teacher’s job is to teach, not to fight, instigate shootings, or end up in jail after an arrest. This should not have happened,” he said.Dr Akhilesh, a retired Deputy Superintendent of Police who now runs a coaching centre, holds the government responsible for the mushrooming network of coaching centres across Bihar. He said, “Forget cities; even if you visit remote villages, you will find coaching centres there. This clearly indicates that the government education system has completely collapsed. The irony is that the Bihar government is now running coaching centres itself, whereas it should have strengthened the school-level education system to ensure a strong foundation for children.”