I have sent the letter below to the Daily Telegraph and the Times of India. They may feel that the trail is cold. But maybe this will keep it alive  ?
 
Good wishes to all
 
John R
 
______________________________________________________________________________
 
To the Editor, The Daily Telegraph
Dear Sir
The thrusting Mr Andrusier seems determined to bid up the value of his letter on the grounds that it is an admission of plagiarism on Kipling’s part.  Anyone who knows anything about Kipling will realise that it is nothing of the sort, and wholly unremarkable.
"Plagiarism" implies passing off someone else's work as one's own, which Kipling certainly did not do. He borrowed stories and ideas and rhythms and cadences from his wide reading,  and from tales told to him, but he transmuted them into something altogether personal and different, as
Shakespeare did, and other notable writers have done. In this letter, which was not written for publication, he was almost certainly using the word ironically.  
Kipling was careful in his use of stories that were told to him. As he tells in Something of Myself  (p. 213) he was once nearly caught out by a young Englishman who told him a tale as a personal experience which he had in fact read in a magazine. When Kipling had written it up he found it a little too slick. Feeling uneasy he did not publish, and then discovered its origins in a dentist's waiting room, by chance: he writes:
 "I found a file of bound Harper's Magazines—say six hundred pages to the volume—dating from the ’fifties. I picked up one, and read as undistractedly as the tooth permitted. There I found my tale, identical in every mark—frozen ground, frozen corpse stiff in its fur robes in the buggy—the inn-keeper offering it a drink—and so on to the ghastly end. Had I published that tale, what could have saved me from the charge of deliberate plagiarism?  Note here. Always, in our trade, look a gift horse at both ends and in the middle. He may throw you.  "
He was no plagiarist, though a master-coiner, expert at transmuting baser metals into gold.
All best wishes,
John Radcliffe, The Kipling Society