BY HANK REICHMAN

The Delhi High Court today ordered Twitter to take down within 48 hours certain tweets by Rutgers University historian Audrey Truschke, days after she and other scholars were barred by the court from publishing a letter accusing an Indian popular historian of plagiarism.

On Tuesday. a large group of scholars had issued an open letter expressing support for Professors Ananya Chakravarti of Georgetown University, Rohit Chopra of Santa Clara University, and Truschke, who, the scholars wrote, had “uncovered several instances of plagiarism in the work of” Vikram Sampath, best known for his two-volume biography of prominent Hindutva proponent, V.D. Savarkar.  For example, a paragraph in the Savarkar biography was near-identical to that in an undergraduate student thesis.  According to the letter, the three US scholars had

uncovered plagiarized material in a published essay based on a lecture Dr. Sampath delivered for the Indian Foundation in Delhi as well as in his recent biography of Savarkar. They sent a letter informing the Royal Historical Society (RHS) where Dr. Sampath is a fellow.  After this letter was posted online, more examples of plagiarism were sent in a second letter to RHS. They also informed Drs. Janaki Bakhle, Vinayak Chaturvedi, and Sukeshi Kamra, whose work had been taken without proper attribution.  Dr. Bakhle also just released a statement confirming that her work and ideas were taken without citation and that her work was cited improperly in the bibliography. . . .

In response to these scholars performing their ethical duty to the field, Dr. Sampath has initiated a defamation case against them in the Delhi High Court arguing that all his references were properly credited and that these allegations of plagiarism were attempts to slander him. The truth, however unpleasant, is not defamation, and filing legal claims against scholars for something as banal as checking citations and disseminating findings of potential academic misconduct to a learned society is a blatant infringement of academic freedom.

The court’s February 18 order restrained Truschke, Chakrabarti and Chopra from further publication of their letters and also barred them from posting anything defamatory against the Indian author on any platform, online or offline.

On Thursday the court approved Sampath’s application seeking removal of tweets about the case posted after the injunction order was issued.  The application also mentioned certain other communications written by Truschke, despite last week’s court order, alleging plagiarism by Sampath.  Twitter told the court that it is only an intermediary and would take down any tweet on orders of the court.

This is a troubling case that illustrates well how in an age of global scholarship academic freedom cannot be defined and defended solely on a country-by-country basis.  Whether or not Sampath is guilty of the plagiarism charges against him, those making the charges should not be preemptively silenced.  As the signatories of the open letter put it, “This kind of review and work should have ideally been done by the editorial houses in which Dr. Sampath’s work has appeared prior to publication.  Regardless of why or how he slipped through the cracks in those cases, it seems better late than never for academics to scrutinize his work and subject it to the minimal standards that we expect even our undergraduate students to follow.”  In any case, the letter continues, “asking a scholar to adhere to globally accepted academic standards for publication should not result in a defamation lawsuit.”

As readers of this blog may recall, Prof. Truschke is no stranger to efforts by Hindu supremacists to intimidate and silence her (see here and here).  As she told a Congressional committee last year, she and her family have repeatedly “been threatened with all manner of violence, including my children who are currently ages seven, five, and three. I often require armed security when I speak publicly, whether about modern South Asia or ancient Indian history. . . .  I want to emphasize how extraordinary and worrisome it is that I require armed protection —on US soil—to speak about areas of my scholarly expertise.”

It is a travesty that a foreign court apparently now has the power to preemptively silence US faculty members engaging in what is, after all, a common enough act of scholarly criticism, and that Twitter is, it seems, willing to facilitate that effort.