Ahmedabad: A reading session of Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai’s memoir ‘I Am Malala’ turned violent in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad city after a group of people identifying as Hindutva workers attacked the participants, police said on Friday, August 28.
The police have arrested three persons in connection with the attack that occurred at Vastrapur Garden on Thursday evening, August 27, an official said.
Vastrapur police station Inspector GM Chaudhary said that a group of nearly 20 people, including women, had gathered at the public garden for the reading and were confronted by an armed group of 18 to 20 individuals, claiming to be from the Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), over their choice of book.
She said that when the readers were leaving the garden after the session, around 18 to 20 people arrived at the site and angrily demanded to know why they had read Yousafzai’s memoir, ‘I Am Malala.’
An altercation ensued, leading to a scuffle in which two people were injured; the attackers were armed with sticks, the official said.
“An FIR has been registered, and two of the accused were known to the victims. Apart from them, six individuals have been identified, and three have already been arrested,” she said.
The attackers claimed to be affiliated with the Bajrang Dal and the VHP, she added.
A first information report (FIR) was registered under sections on rioting, unlawful assembly, and causing physical pain under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the official said.
A few weeks ago, a private school in Ahmedabad was forced to drop books by Yousafzai and Holocaust survivor Anne Frank from its mandatory reading list after protests from right-wing groups.
Congress leader Pawan Khera reacted to the incident on X, calling out the right-wing workers for “poking their noses into matters they don’t understand.”
“Ignorance, with a dash of communalism, is an incurable disease,” Khera wrote on X. He said that the Bajrang Dal’s logic was that a Muslim Malala’s book cannot be read.
Khera said Malala rose to prominence for standing up for women’s rights, which, according to Hindutva’s own ‘Save Muslim women’ logic, makes her the perfect icon. “In fact, she could have been their Global Brand Ambassador,” he said, adding that their habit of poking their noses into matters they don’t understand got the better of them.
