INDIA, July 18, 2015 (Firstpost, by Rajeev Srinivasan): HPI note: following are excerpts from this long essay which may be read in full at “source” above. See also R. Jagannathan’s article at http://www.firstpost.com/india/rajiv-malhotras-net-plagiarism-charge-shows-no-longer-man-ignore-2349652.html, which goes into more detail on the exact instances of alleged plagiarism, and Shoaib Daniyal’s article, http://scroll.in/article/740814/plagiarism-row-how-rajiv-malhotra-become-the-ayn-rand-of-internet-hindutva.
There has been a lot of commotion over on social media lately about the books written by Indian American author Rajiv Malhotra, who has single-handedly stood up to forces in US academia who paint, according to him, a negative, motivated, and false picture of Hinduism. This is not a purely abstract issue, as it impinges on soft power, positioning, and the marketing of India to the world, something that previous governments paid scarcely any attention to, but the current one does.
To put it simply, the issue is as follows: one Richard Fox Young has gone on the warpath against Malhotra, accusing him of plagiarism, based on some material that was allegedly quoted without explicit attribution in his books Indra’s Net and Breaking India.
Let us consider the basis of the attack on Malhotra: that he has plagiarized. Insofar as I can tell, what he is accused of is acceptable under the definition of ‘fair use’ in the US Copyright Act 1976, 17 USC Section 107, and under ‘fair dealing’ in the Indian Copyright Act of 1957, Section 52. If you peruse these provisions, you will find that the quoting of copyright materials for ‘research’ is allowed without hindrance, as it is for teaching as well, so long as it is not used for monetary benefit to the user.
Thus, there is little basis in fact for the allegation, a priori, and I suspect that if Malhotra sues, he will win. However, it is an excellent tactic, known as “throwing some mud and seeing how much will stick”. The objective is not to penalize the alleged plagiarism, but to create the impression that Malhotra is intellectually dishonest, the equivalent of accusing him of a felony, which will remain as a stain even if he is exonerated.