Time for a “Diagnostic Test” on Rajiv Malhotra’s Books

Public Domain
01 August, 2015

In New Jersey, where Rajiv Malhotra, an Indian-American public intellectual, and I live as near neighbours in the town of Princeton, all vehicles—from clunkers to limos­­­—have to undergo a periodic diagnostic test of their roadworthiness.  Electrodes are attached to the vehicle’s engine, some sort of hose stuck into its tailpipe, and a sticker slapped onto the driver-side window if it passes. Drive without one and you could get pulled over and fined. The test has relatively little to do with the octane, high or low, of the gas you buy at the pump. It's about how your vehicle measures up when a diagnostic test is done in conformity with New Jersey’s minimalistic safety standards. Is it a hazard on the highway or not?

On and off for the past four years, I’ve been doing a similar test on Rajiv Malhotra’s oeuvre. My interest was drawn to two books in particular, Breaking India (New Delhi: Amaryllis, 2011) and Indra’s Net (New Delhi: HarperCollins India, 2014). It was because I found Malhotra’s “thinly religionised” Hindutva nationalist ideology odious that I read him attentively and attempted, unsuccessfully, to engage him in the time-hallowed ways of academe. I tried to do so through a co-authored critique of Breaking IndiaStudied Silences: Diasporic Nationalism, “Intellectual Kshatriyas” and the Hindu American Critique of Dalit Christianity’s Indianness, in a book that I co-edited.

After Breaking India I moved on to Indra’s Net, but as I was reading both books ever so closely, a collateral concern about their roadworthiness on the highway of knowledge (excuse the metaphor!) gnawed at the edges of my awareness. I could sense that it wasn’t only because of low tire-pressure that Malhotra’s books seemed to lurch and thump along. However, it was only after I plugged SafeAssign (a plagiarism detection software) into the tail pipe of Indra’s Net—the book I had singled out for an especially thorough inspection—that I found irrefutable confirmation of the plagiarism I had suspected all along.

In his recent book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015), Jon Ronson explores how Twitter has become every digital terrorist’s favorite weapon of “mass online destruction”.  Still, one doesn’t publicly “shame” a person like Rajiv Malhotra on social media as I have attempted to, without trepidation. Done carelessly, it could be ruinous—as it has been for several victims who have been wrongly maligned in the past, as Ronson illustrates in his book. It was imperative to level such a charge only after doing my homework as meticulously as I could and I did, both for Malhotra’s sake and mine. After all, I did not want to bear false witness against him or set myself up for a nosedive into obloquy. When various iterations of the SafeAssign test led to the same conclusion regarding the text of Indra’s Net, I went ahead and pressed the tweet button on Twitter back in early July this year. Using the hashtag #Message4Rajiv, I adduced seven examples of the evidence (adding an eighth later) I had culled from Malhotra’s books in a series of more than sixty-six consecutive tweets, all of which were numbered.

Back in 2012, Michael Moynihan, an American journalist, had found himself in a similar position when he revealed that Jonah Lehrer—a former writer with the New Yorker—had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works. While recounting the sequence of events that led to this revelation and the trauma that he felt afterwards, Moynihan is quoted as saying in Ronson’s book, “What we do, when we fuck up, we don’t lose our job, we lose our vocation.” My unease was hardly as great as Moynihan talks of experiencing, but I, too, made the disclosures with a degree of hesitation.

Ten days later and unbeknownst to me, a denizen of Rajiv Malhotra’s online clique sent a retaliatory email warning to my colleagues at Princeton Theological Seminary (PTS), the institution where I teach. PTS is often referred to as “obscurantist” by Malhotra’s allies—evidently with his approval. The subject of this email was, “Exposing an Internet Troll on Your Faculty,” and the writer identified himself as Ram Jagessar, an Indo-Caribbean Canadian-Hindu journalist writing from Toronto. Characterising my tweets as the “rantings of a person crazed by envy and rage,” Jagessar referred to himself as a member of the “5,000 strong Rajiv Malhotra Discussion Group.” Stating that he was “about to launch a wide ranging expose” of me as “an ugly Christian academic troll,” he boasted of being able to unleash against PTS a barrage of digital missiles, using a “list of 4,500 Hindu organisations world wide.” The “gloves [would] come off,” Jagessar warned, unless his conditions were met—an apology from me to Rajiv Malhotra, “admitting the error of my ways” and promising to “cease and desist [my] idiotic and useless tweets.”

Ordinarily, an email such as this would go into the trash without the blink of an eye, and that’s where several of my colleagues immediately put it. When I learned of it, however, I felt that it might be a mistake to shrug it off. Jagessar happens to be a prominent Toronto-based “Intellectual Kshatriya” (a term of self-description popular with Malhotra’s clique), whose emails are a staple of the Malhotra-managed Yahoo listserv, dubbed the “Yahooligans” by a commentator on Reddit.

In the weeks since this soap opera, now in its umpteenth act, got going, Malhotra’s fanciful excuses have included the claim that an attempt was being made to deprive him of his “intellectual freedom.” This was plainly disingenuous of Malhotra, considering Jagessar’s bald-faced attempt to deprive me of mine, by the kind of intimidation ordinarily called blackmail. As the entire faculty at PTS—apart from me—found this person’s email in their inboxes on the morning of 13 July 2015, I wanted them to hear my side of the story, too. Here, in part, is what I wrote:

Colleagues —

On the surprise email from Ram Jagessar of Toronto, I’d like to provide a bit of background. In brief, but with more than 140 characters …

On Twitter, I have adduced evidence of serial acts of plagiarism (not of my work but others’) by a Princeton-resident, Rajiv Malhotra, a Hindu American public intellectual, wealthy IT entrepreneur and founder of a Hindu-nationalist think tank, the Infinity Foundation.

Four years ago, along with John Boopalan, our PhD candidate in [Religion and Society], I attended a lecture at the University [Princeton] for the launching of a book by Mr. Malhotra, called Breaking India (New Delhi 2011). Much to our dismay, Malhotra launched into a rant, calling Christianity a “cancer” in the body of India that must be ripped out, being spread by a nexus of Christian evangelicals, Washington politicians, and corrupt Indian academics. Especially troubling was that he characterized Dalit converts to Christianity as mentally deficient and incapable of making responsible decisions on their own (hence, his support for the legal constraints on ‘conversion’ now in place in many of India’s states).

After the book launch at the University, I became less willing to pursue my scholarship in the distantiated way I always have (or told myself I did). In short, I was ‘conscientized,’ and I have never looked back since. Still, John Boopalan and I trod the timeworn path of routine scholarship and produced an essay on Malhotra’s noxious mischaracterizations of Indian Christianity and Dalit Christians. […] Attempts have proven futile to elicit any response at all to the book by Malhotra.

In the course of reading Breaking India, I noted a number of possible plagiarisms[;] the first, of my beloved mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, Wilhelm Halbfass, irked me a great deal. On the very same page, 62 words, without quotation marks or acknowledgement, were taken out [of] a book by French scholar Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise, published by Harvard University Press. Besides this, in another more recent publication of Malhotra’s called Indra’s Net (2014), published by HarperCollins India, I found the plagiarism to be even more massive, especially of a book published by Columbia University Press called Unifying Hinduism by a friend and colleague, Andrew Nicholson of SUNY, Stony Brook.

As Mr. Malhotra is not an academic (and holds academe in the utmost contempt), I had no means (I did consider a number) other than social media to call attention to his infractions of the code of academic ethics the rest of us have to live by. Had he been affiliated to an institution of higher education, I could/would have drawn the attention of that institution to the issue; presumably, a panel would have been commissioned to weigh the evidence, and a variety of penalties might be enforced, from probation to dismissal.

In the absence of such mechanisms, here’s what I did —

After months of painstaking research, I selected seven examples from the two previously mentioned Malhotra books. I uploaded a statement as to what my issues were and my methodology for adducing and assessing the evidence. I uploaded Princeton University’s Code of Academic Conduct, its handbook definition of plagiarism (same as ours; we admit as much, and provide the link to PU), and its oh-so-helpful guidelines for recognizing and assessing actual cases of it. I then uploaded the seven examples, each with the original and the Malhotra copy highlighted to show precisely what he had lifted, without quotation marks or acknowledgments in most cases or only with acknowledgments in some (but with quotation marks removed). I then uploaded An Open Letter to Rajiv Malhotra’s Publishers, and that was that, although the struggle to interpret and defend the evidence against Mr. Malhotra waxes fierce, even as I speak. The surprise email from Ram Jagessar is a case in point.

As for Jagessar, […] I do not think it an exaggeration to call him a digital bully and blackmailer. One target of his for nearly a decade has been Anantanand Rambachan, professor of Religious Studies at St Olaf’s [Northfield, MN], respected by all for his scholarship and involvements in Hindu-Christian dialogue (Vatican Council for Interfaith Dialogue, WCC, etc.). Jagessar has orchestrated mass campaigns against him—and, coincidentally, Frank Clooney of Harvard [Divinity School]—as recently as April [2015] when the two of them participated in an interfaith dialogue at a Hindu temple in Virginia [The Durga Mandir, Fairfax Station, VA]. Ram Jagessar spammed their email and threatened protests; security in fact had to be arranged for them.

As a scholar and person of faith, I have decided I simply cannot live out my calling in the hallways of academe alone. There are those ‘pipe-like things out there that they call the Internet.’

In the meantime, the fur is flying, and I am ever, ever so sorry that the Seminary was targeted. I do not tweet on a PTS email account and have tried my darnedest to keep PTS out of the picture. The snoops have apparently prowled through our online bio pages, which, of course, are publicly accessible.

N.B.: On Twitter, “troll” means many things and Twitter bullies accuse people like me of being trolls when we get in the way by holding them to account for the noxious things they say. See for yourselves.

Regards,

Richard

Yes, do please see for yourselves how I hold Rajiv Malhotra responsible for the mess he’s made in the oversized stall he occupies in the Augean Stables of Twitter. For someone who considers himself a much-abused victim of plagiarism and serially accuses others of it, the evidence I adduced confirms that he is himself a serial victimiser whose plagiarism we must not ignore.

As I write this piece, America’s Vedanta Wars, an essay I did for Seminar—a periodical based in New Delhi—has just become available online and publicly accessible today. Anyone unsatisfied with the backstory offered in the email I wrote to my colleagues should go there for more on why I went for broke and made use of “those pipe-like things out there that they call the Internet” to confront Rajiv Malhotra in a conscientised act of engaged scholarship. In the last line of that essay, referring to the way academics usually shy away from public kerfuffles, I have written, “A more robust response may be needed.” That’s exactly why I did what I did on Twitter, and why I’m doing it still. It may be a soap opera, but it’s no laughing matter. It’s about the roadworthiness of the books we write—the cleanness of our scholarship—and the urgency of keeping vehicles off the road when they can’t even pass a routine diagnostic test of academic integrity.


Richard Fox Young s an associate professor at Princeton Theological Seminary (Princeton, NJ, USA). He holds the Timby Chair in the History of Religions.