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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........

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