"Plaguerism", indeed!
I think we need to look a little deeper into this matter, and take telling slips of the keyboard like the above seriously. Malhotra is clearly experienced by most scholars on this list and RISA as a form of "plague," someone so far beyond the pale (sic!) that he needs to be definitively suppressed, squelched, cast into outer darkness, to use just a few of many available clichés for what seems to most responders here to be obvious. Of course all are at least tacitly aware that academic ire will do nothing to shut down the jingoism that is perceived to support Malhotra's project. On the contrary, it will simply increase the bias against "Western" Indology.
I suggest that the focus be kept on Malhotra as a post-colonial agent, not on the man as purported plagiarist. What he is trying to do belongs with the work of Indian freedom fighters like Aurobindo, Vivekananda, and Gandhi, and is not an attempt to compete with Halbfass, Renou, or Pollock. He is a public intellectual, and I think standards for citation are different for such individuals. Think of fueilletonists in Weimar Germany like Walter Benjamin, Karl Kraus, Josef Strauss. Or thinkers like Freud, Jung, Koestler. Malhotra is a kind of journalist, one with an ax to grind (like most journalists) but certainly he has never claimed to be a scholar and should not be attacked for being a bad one.
The question we should ask is why this obvious fact is not clear. Malhotra should be considered an object of study, and above all a cultural interlocutor, not a failed academic competitor. He needs to be taken seriously as a Hindu or contemporary Indian phenomenon, not as a scholar, for which he would never be mistaken.
Al Collins, Ph.D., Ph.D.