A year before being shot in the head by Taliban gunmen, 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai noted in her diary, “I was very scared because the Taliban announced yesterday that girls should stop going to schools.” She, however, survived the attack and grew up to be the youngest-ever Nobel laureate. Her diary was later published as an autobiographical book, I Am Malala.

Several decades before Malala wrote about her fear, Anne Frank, another 14-year-old girl in Amsterdam, made an entry in her personal diary: “Yesterday I had a horrible fright. At eight o’clock, the doorbell suddenly rang. All I could think of was that someone was coming to get us, you know who I mean.” Anne and her family remained holed up for two years in the secret annex of a warehouse before being discovered by the Nazis. She died young in a concentration camp, but her diary survived and was later published as a book — The Diary of a Young Girl.

Cut to August 27, 2026.

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A mob of Hindutva vigilantes entered a public park in Ahmedabad and started heckling a group of students and activists for publicly reading I Am Malala and The Diary of a Young Girl. The gathering was organised to protest against a city school’s decision to take the two books off the reading list following objections from some parents and right-wing organisations. It was a protest to protect the citizen’s right to read.

The vigilantes demanded to know why they were reading “Pakistani” Malala’s book and Anne Frank’s diary. In the ensuing mayhem, they allegedly pounced upon the silent protesters, beating, dragging and pushing them around. They tried to snatch the books and asked, “Do you know what Malala said about Kashmir?”

The Bajrang Dal released two videos of the ruckus on its official X handle, taking responsibility for the violence: “First we tried to reason with them, but when they did not listen, then we talked to them in the Bajrangi language.”

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But what did Malala say about Kashmir that angered the Bajrang Dal?

In 2019, after the government revoked Article 370, she did make an appeal to the authorities urging them to “prioritise the safety of children and women” in Kashmir and resolve the dispute peacefully. But in doing so, wasn’t she expressing concerns about our own citizens who live in Kashmir — India’s atoot ang?

Ironically, two days after the Bajrang Dal workers disrupted the book-reading protest, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat told a gathering in New York, “If any Hindu thinks there should be no Muslims in India, he will not remain Hindu.” He lamented that “wrong narratives created perceptions” about the RSS, and invited people to “come and see us from within” to dispel those perceptions.

In the digital age, no one needs to “come and see” the reality of an organisation whose affiliates often indulge in violence to enforce their fiat — disrupting a peaceful gathering, demanding that a teenage Muslim hawker prove his identity, or slapping him into chanting Jai Sri Ram. It’s the videos of such brazen acts of violence that damage the reputation of the RSS, rather than “wrong narratives” as Bhagwat claims.

The resource-rich RSS is capable of putting up impressive stage shows anywhere in the world, but it will not fix the deep credibility crisis it faces. It’s not enough for the RSS to distance itself, as it often does, from the nefarious acts of its affiliated organisations just by saying that the swayamsevaks are not controlled by the Sangh.

It’s anybody’s guess whether the men who disrupted the book reading in Ahmedabad, have actually read I Am Malala, or have even heard of Anne Frank. The two young girls, separated by time and geography, faced unspeakable brutality at the hands of totalitarian forces. And now their brave testimonies are being targeted in India by Hindutva forces that believe in coercion rather than dialogue.

The sooner Mohan Bhagwat realises that his swayamsevaks are in bad company, the quicker he can implement a course correction.

The writer is a Delhi-based journalist