By Sandeep Verma 
Patna, June 3: The guard was still bleeding when Khan Sir pulled up to his coaching centre at half past eleven on Tuesday night.
Whatever had happened, it had already happened. The mob was gone. What was left behind told the story well enough: smashed windows, a torn-down banner, wrecked property inside the building, and a security guard with a badly injured head being rushed to hospital. Khan Sir walked into what was left of his institute and, within the hour, was standing in front of reporters saying exactly what he thought.
Nobody who knows him was surprised by that part.
The Night It All Came Apart
The attack on Khan GS Research Centre in Patna’s Musallahpur Haat area happened sometime Tuesday evening. A group of men, reportedly somewhere between 15 and 20 of them, forced their way into or near the premises. They pelted stones. They smashed things. They beat the guard on duty badly enough that he had to be hospitalised. The coaching centre’s banner was ripped down. Inside, property was damaged.
By the time Khan Sir arrived, the area was already crawling with police. Senior officers, including the Patna SSP and SP, had rushed to the spot. Statements were being recorded. CCTV footage was being pulled.
What nobody could agree on, at least not yet, was whether guns had actually been fired.
Early reports claimed anywhere between 5 and 10 rounds had been discharged outside the centre. That version spread fast, especially on social media, and by late Tuesday night, the story had acquired the shape of a full-blown armed attack. By Wednesday morning, though, Patna Police had issued a clarification. Based on what their teams had seen in the CCTV footage, there was no evidence of any shooting. The matter, they said, would be treated as physical assault and vandalism.
Khan Sir, for his part, has maintained that shots were fired. His institute’s security guard, he says, has identified some of the attackers. The CCTV footage, all 20 cameras worth of it, has been handed over to investigators. An FIR has been filed.
Two versions, one incident, and investigators still working through it all.
What Khan Sir Said
He was not calm when he spoke to reporters. Not theatrical, not rehearsed, just plainly angry in the way someone gets when they feel they have been targeted, and they have been waiting for something like this.
“Some anti-social elements from a nearby coaching created widespread damage,” he said. “Beat our guard badly and even fired gunshots. Their primary angst is how can someone teach students at such a low cost and still deliver thousands of results each year.”
He was talking about the Bihar Police Recruitment exam results, released recently, where his students had done well enough to make people uncomfortable.
Then he said something that landed harder: “The main issue seems to be why we are teaching for such low fees. Why are we getting such massive results? We appeal to the administration to keep security concerns in mind, recognising that the poor, too, have the right to an education.”
There was more. He alleged that the attack did not come out of nowhere. Threats, he claimed, had been issued against the institute before Tuesday night. That the attackers threatened to “blow up the coaching institute within two days.” That the assault happened while online batches were still running inside the building. Students were attending class when the mob showed up outside.
He called it a childish act. But he also called it coordinated.
What the Police Are Saying
SP City Diksha spoke to reporters on Wednesday morning and confirmed that the people involved appeared to be associated with a coaching centre located directly across the road. Between 10 and 12 individuals had already been identified through CCTV analysis. Formal complaints were being recorded. Arrests, she suggested, were coming.
SP Kartikeya K. Sharma was more careful with his words. “This is a case involving physical assault,” he said. “The injured guard is undergoing treatment. Further action is being taken after recording statements from the victim and local residents.”
On the question of gunfire, the police have not confirmed it based on available footage. That gap between what Khan Sir alleges and what police have visually verified is where the investigation currently sits.
Preliminary findings from the CCTV review pointed toward individuals linked to Gyan Bindu Coaching Centre, a rival institute in the same area. That centre, for its part, has pushed back. Their representatives have alleged that it was actually people linked to Khan Classes who fired during the clash. Both sides pointing fingers at each other, and the police in the middle of it, working through footage and witness statements.
Students on the Streets
By Wednesday morning, word had moved faster than the investigation. A large crowd of students gathered outside the coaching centre in Musallahpur Haat. Heavy security was deployed. Students raised slogans, demanded action, demanded protection. “We want justice. We want security,” one student told reporters.
It was not hard to understand why they came out. Khan Sir is not just a popular teacher. For a very specific kind of student in Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh, the kind who grew up without money, without connections, without access to the kind of tutoring that middle-class families take for granted, he represents something much harder to replace than a coaching centre. He represents proof that the system can be beaten at its own game without spending a fortune to do it.
An attack on his institute did not feel, to his students, like a commercial dispute between two businesses. It felt personal. It felt like something was trying to be shut down that should not be shut down.
What Is Actually Going On Here
Patna’s coaching industry is big business. Serious, organised, politically connected big business. The city is one of the most important exam preparation hubs in the country, drawing students from across Bihar and neighbouring states. The bigger centres charge fees that can run into tens of thousands of rupees. They have infrastructure, local influence, and years of established territory.
Into that world, Khan Sir built something different. Massive batches. Fees that working-class families could manage. A teaching style that translated complicated subjects into language that a student from a small UP or Bihar town could actually follow and actually remember. His YouTube numbers ran into the tens of millions. His exam results became genuinely difficult for the industry to dismiss.
That kind of competition does not just eat into the bottom line. In a city where coaching centres have built their reputations on exam results, it threatens the entire premise of why students pay premium fees elsewhere. When someone demonstrates that you do not need to pay premium fees to get premium results, the market logic of the established players collapses.
Whether that competitive pressure translated into Tuesday night’s attack, whether there was actual coordination and planning behind what looks on the surface like a mob assault, is exactly what investigators are now trying to establish. If Khan Sir’s allegation that threats were issued beforehand holds up, it significantly changes the nature of what the police are dealing with.
Where Things Stand
For now, the guard is in hospital. The FIR has been filed. Between 10 and 20 people have been identified on camera. Raids are underway. Security has been tightened around the institute.
Khan Sir is not backing down. His students are not backing down either. And somewhere in the footage from 20 CCTV cameras, the police are looking for the full picture of what actually happened outside one of Patna’s most recognisable coaching centres on a Tuesday night in June.
The coaching wars of Bihar just became something much harder to ignore.
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- Sandeep Verma
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Ananya Sharma