New Delhi: A simple act of peaceful resistance to right-wing forces – reading books at a public park in Ahmedabad, Gujarat – led to chaos, assault and a police case after a mob descended on the readers.On Thursday (August 27), a group of Ahmedabad residents led by the Student and Youth Collective Ahmedabad (SYCA) and Gujarat Reads Anyway (GRA) gathered at a public park in Vastrapur, an upmarket residential area in the state capital. Their aim was to read a selection of highly-regarded books and memoirs from around the world, including Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl and Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala.SYCA and GRA had made a conscious decision to read the two books by Frank, a Jewish girl who died in Germany during Hitler’s Holocaust aged only 15 and Yousafzai, a Nobel Prize-winning activist from Pakistan who survived a Taliban assassination attempt, following a series of recent developments.First, on August 11, the parents of some students enrolled in the city’s Anand Niketan school had protested over a piece of glass found by a child in the food she was served. Later, a group of parents alleged that the school was engaging in religious “discrimination” by forcing their children to read books by Yousafzai and Frank.In response, the school fired a consultant – its own former student – who had worked with his alma mater as a “curriculum designer and teacher trainer” and who happens to be a Muslim.These events prompted a few residents and the SYCA and GRA to read these world-famous books collectively in public, signalling resistance to censorship, exclusion and discrimination.Two violent groups, allegedly including members of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal, descended on a peaceful gathering reading books in a public park in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on August 27, 2026. Photo by arrangement.The books they had brought to the AUDA Garden in Vastrapur included works on the revolutionary freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, the first law minister B.R. Ambedkar and the first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.But a group of 45 or 50 people, reportedly associated with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) and Bajrang Dal, arrived at the park and attacked them with sticks and bats. Members of the violent mob assaulted the women readers and disrupted their silent reading session. The violent groups’ primary objection? Yousafzai’s memoirs.Participants in the reading session said that the mob arrived shouting provocative communal slogans and raising loud “Jai Shree Ram” chants as well as calling the readers “anti-Kashmir” (as in, opposed to the government’s policies regarding Jammu and Kashmir) and so on.The violent mob also came armed with baseball bats, heavy wooden sticks and bhagwa flags wrapped around iron rods.The attendees of the reading session who faced the mob say it was a hate crime and that it had serious implications for their physical safety.“This was a pre-planned hate crime and an attempted mob lynching,” said Jay Thakkar, one of the members of the reading session. He said the violent group dragged three people away and kept assaulting them. The mob wanted to grievously hurt those people, he said.Thakkar alleged that members of the violent groups called the participants “terrorists”. At one point, some members of the mob shouted communal remarks such as “Pant utar ke dekh lena ki vo Muslim hai ki nahi.” (Undress these people to check whether they are Muslims).The readers said that, at first when the mob arrived, they tried to explain that the books they had brought included works on figures such as Bhagat Singh, Ambedkar and Nehru. Thakkar says he suggested that the group sing the national anthem together. It was actually sung.But all this failed to calm the mob.The meet-up participants later filed a complaint. In it, they allege that immediately after the anthem concluded, members of the violent groups began assaulting them. Their complaint names Hiren Rabari and Jimit Rabari among those allegedly present and accuses the groups of launching a coordinated attack.The complaint also makes it clear that their gathering had come together just to read books at the park.The SYCA has said that the mob took readers to different parts of the garden and beat them, slapped them, scratched them, punched them hard and dragged them before arriving at a police van parked nearby. But even in front of the police, they kept beating the readers.The SYCA claims that the police told the assaulted book-readers to sit inside the van, saying, “We do not know with these people, they can even kill you.”The Wire accessed the FIR lodged at the Vastrapur Police Station by the readers against the assault by the violent groups. They have also submitted videos, medical records and the sticks allegedly left behind by the groups as evidence. They have asked the police to preserve CCTV footage from the garden and surrounding establishments.The case was registered on August 28, and it records an incident having occurred between 6 pm on August 27 and 12:30 am on August 28. It invokes sections 189(1), 119(2), 191(3), 190, 115(2) and 351(2) of the Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita, related to an unlawful assembly, joint liability for violent acts of a mob, voluntarily causing grievous hurt, rioting, intimidation and other offences.