For over a decade, I have tracked a US-based movement that has fabricated new identities like "Dalit-Christian" and "Afro-Dalit". The notion of Dalit-Christian was developed to convince the Dalits that they were non-Hindus, and that Hinduism was a system of exploitation for which Christianity was the solution. The Afro-Dalit project is based on racist ideas, according to which, Dalits are the "blacks of India". This manipulation of history says that just as white Americans enslaved blacks, so too Hindus and the Indian nation have been enslaving the Dalits.

Such movements seek to separate Indians from their own heritage, break their sense of unity and convert Hindus. In a clever strategy, these evangelists and leftists come amongst us as wolves in sheep's clothing, using the cover of human rights for India's downtrodden, thereby gaining sympathy from the rich, the powerful and the naïve.

This "Christian-Afro-Dalit" narrative is often extended to include Dravidians into the fold. The objective is to cause internal rift between these groups and the rest of the country. I have labelled such movements as forces "breaking India", and have spent considerable energy exposing them through direct encounters.

A very large Christian seminary located in New Jersey, barely five minutes from my home, is one of the major factories for churning out these ideologies. This seminary is amongst the largest in the United States and has a sizeable investment in studying Hinduism from an adversarial perspective. Many Indian sepoys are trained here to "break India".

This seminary's top expert on Hinduism is a senior evangelist, Richard Fox Young. Their tactic is the old divide-and-rule policy. They have studied the prey well and designed their tactics with precision. They infiltrate Hindu communities as Trojan horses. The naïve amongst us welcome them in the spirit of dharma. They pretend to have a genuine interest in us, to want to study us and write about us for our benefit. Most Indians do not see them for the Trojan horses that they are, and unwittingly make themselves complicit in breaking India.

It might surprise many Indians that such Christian projects have co-opted Indian leftists, feminists, post-colonialists and non-Christian groups that share the common ideological goal of undermining Hindu dharma. I use the term "Hinduphobia" to refer to this mindset. As expected, they have had me in their crosshairs for a long time, making unceasing attempts to silence me. They know I have a goldmine of data on them, and that I am not afraid to stick my neck out to unmask them.

{ The irony is that I am accused of stealing my own heritage back. What is never being mentioned is that this American scholar, in fact, has built his career taking Indian materials and spinning them in sophisticated English in his own name.

The most recent attack against me came immediately after I announced my next book, The Battle for Sanskrit, at the World Sanskrit Congress in Bangkok just a few weeks ago. The traditional Sanskrit scholars loved the vision of the book. However, Western scholars and their Indian cronies (who showing little self-respect, blindly dance to their tune) were angered by it. They mounted a weak charge against me, hoping that some dirt would stick even if their charge could not, using their widespread media contacts to spread the message far and wide.

Their one charge is that an earlier book of mine "plagiarises" material from a scholar named Nicholson. They avoid mentioning the critical fact that the book cites and names Nicholson some 30 times in the chapter in which his works are relevant. They alleged that I should have added quotation marks in a few other instances. However, numerous independent readers have read my book in detail, and published their findings online that, in every case, reference was clearly made to Nicholson, explicitly or implicitly.

It also turns out that Nicholson had copied ideas from Indian writers on the history of Hindu philosophy. The irony is that I am accused of stealing my own heritage back. What is never being mentioned is that this American scholar, in fact, has built his career taking Indian materials and spinning them in sophisticated English in his own name.

There was a backlash to Young's vicious and unfounded plagiarism charges against me. His petition demanding that my publishers withdraw my books garnered merely 250 signatures as against the over 10,500 signatures in the counter-petition to support me. Both sides presented their evidence in their respective petitions. The public had spoken.

Rather than accepting that their hit-job had failed, my opponents started vicious media attacks against me. Young took on the role of the infamous General Dyer, while the Indian media's sepoys obeyed his command to attack me. None of these media persons seemed to know anything about the book that was the subject of discussion. Yet, they were making judgements, not independently, but collectively, like a mafia. The content of their writings seem to suggest a pre-packaged media brief, a laziness to pursue independent verification, an inability to think critically, and Hinduphobia.

This attack on me triggered a swift and powerful response. Within a few days, numerous Hindu writers surfaced to defend me using their own perspectives and arguments. Contrary to my attackers' expectations, not only did we hold our ground, but we demonstrated the ability to mount a unified counterattack against the Hinduphobic media.

Many journalists wrote pieces that revealed an abysmal ignorance of the issues and arguments on both sides. One website shot off five articles in rapid succession, each restating the same few points.

Despite the Indian media's claim of supporting free speech and truth-telling, mainstream newspapers failed to carry my rebuttals to their extensively published articles filled with misinformation. They took to describing me as a "wealthy businessman", even though I have been retired from all for-profit activities for over 20 years now, having gifted all my business interests to the management that had worked for me. My family did not inherit any shares or royalty interests in any of the companies I owned. I decided to make a clean break from accumulating wealth through any means whatsoever.

It is amazing that editors and journalists in these top newspapers failed to gather such basic facts and made outright errors.

It is a dishonour to journalism that these media persons refused to balance their reporting with the widely available counter evidence to the spurious charges against me. It seems that their approach was geared to sensationalism. No one asked the first and simple question: Why would I name Nicholson some 30 times if I wanted to deny him as the source of some ideas in a chapter of my book?

It would be most laughable, if it were not so serious a breach of ethics, that they all fell into the trap of presenting Richard Fox Young as if he worked at Princeton University, when in reality he teaches at a Christian seminary in the town of Princeton.

The result has been reader deception, a parody of journalism, injustice to me, and a cowardly refusal to allow me to present a rebuttal in the same newspapers and with the same prominence given to the attacks. It is a shameful day for journalism in India.

- Rajiv Malhotra