FIR in English? Can't act, says Bihar cop

A police inspector, who is officiating as a Station House Officer (SHO) of a thana in Bihar's Munger district, has informed the local court that he can't act on an FIR written in English.

Reason being, no one in the police station is well-versed with the Queen's language and so it will be difficult to investigate the case as the FIR was written in English.

Sounds bizarre. But it's true in this part of the cow-belt where a Chief Judicial Magistrate, F Rehman has taken umbrage over the SHO Sriram Choudhary's reply which says "no officer in Kotwali police station knows English and therefore can't act on the FIR."

According to sources in Munger, the CJM had instructed the police to register an FIR in a complaint case (No. 499C/17). The complaint was lodged by a Gurgaon-based contractor Mahendra Singh against Y Kiren Kumar, CEO of a Hyderabad-based private company in the court of Munger.

The claim was that Hyderabad-based company had not paid Rs 30-lakhs to Singh who worked as a contractor for the Ganga bridge in Munger.

"Though the CJM asked the police to register an FIR, the cops did not comply with the court order for around five months," said the complainant's lawyer Sashi Shekhar Singh.

Miffed over the police approach, the CJM issued show-cause notice to the SHO and asked the Munger DIG Vikas Vaibhav to initiate contempt proceedings against Choudhary.

The SHO eventually replied to the court saying that "it would be difficult to investigate the case as no officer at the police station knows English."

The DIG, meanwhile, contended that a probe was on into the case, but admitted that the SHO should have got the FIR translated in Hindi.