It is perfectly clear that there are fundamental differences of opinion, including two very different views of what scholarship (especially historical scholarship) should do and what its responsibilities to the past and the present are. But it is also clear from the petition and many other cases that Malhotra and his followers purposely distort Pollock's arguments in order to make them accord with the caricature they have presented. They need to believe that he is a present-day Thomas Macaulay who has "deep antipathy" to "Indian culture." That, in the end, is what this petition is about. The point is simply to try to harass, malign, and discredit people who write things that don't always and entirely accord with a particular vision of the Indian past (or present, as seems to be more relevant here) using the divisive and ugly rhetoric that Malhotra has coined ("insiders" and "outsiders," "sepoys," "Orientalists," "Macaulayites," etc.).

I would say that Malhotra and his followers are free to raise money for their own series of books that will duly reflect their vision of the Indian past, but they have actually done this, and anyway that's not the point: it's to *stop* the people they disagree with.