Above the fold: Top stories of the day
1. The Dadri police want Bharatiya Janata Janata party MLA Sangeet Som, Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma and Bahujan Samaj Party general secretary Naseemuddin Siddiqui booked for violating prohibitory orders at Bisara village.
2. India will grow at 7.5% in 2016, faster than China, the International Monetary Fund predicts.
3. Under siege from the Trinamool Congress for deploying Central forces at the recent civic polls, West Bengal state election commissioner Susanta Ranjan Upadhyay quits.

The Big Story: Angry like us
Writer Nayantara Sahgal has returned her Sahitya Akademi Award to mark her protest on the "vanishing space" for diversity. In a letter titled "The unmaking of India", she cited the killing of rationalists who dared challenge Hindutva, the lynching of Mohammad Akhlaq in Dadri and the silence of the prime minister about this "reign of terror". Her gesture, she said, was in memory of all those who had been killed and in defence of the right to dissent.

Sahgal, niece of Jawaharlal Nehru, won her award for the novel Rich Like Us . Published in 1985, it is a scathing critique of the Emergency, of the terror unleashed by Indira Gandhi and the excesses of the wealthy political elite. Sahgal's book is iconic for its grim images of the Emergency, at a time when the reigning common sense was still the Congress system. Not every critic had such luck. A few years earlier, when Indira Gandhi was still alive, lines from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children had to be expunged: they were less than complimentary about the prime minister.  Gestures of dissent by writers have enormous symbolic power – Sahgal might have been referencing Tagore, who renounced his knighthood in protest against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre and wrote a song about it. Six other writers have also returned their awards to the Akademi, according to her statement.

Scattered writers still have the will to stand against governing ideologies. What seems to have changed since the 1980s is the role of the literary institution. In 1986, it was handing out awards to writers who spoke out against the powerful. In 2015, it collects awards from writers who wish to speak out against the powerful.

The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the biggest story of the day
The full text of Nayantara Sahgal's statement explaining why she returned her Sahitya Akademi Award. Rajdeep Sardesai asks if the writer was being hypocritical by returning the award.

Politicking and policying
1. Now BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj joins the fray, saying people would "rather die than tolerate" an insult to "gau mata".
2. The army resists the home affairs ministry's plan to build an embankment on the International Border at Jammu.
3. A Lokniti-CSDS pre-poll survey suggests the BJP has the lead in BIhar.

Punditry
1. In the Hindu, Neelanjan Sircar, Bhanu Joshi and Ashish Ranjan talk about the changed electoral calculus in Bihar, saying parties will have to rely on more than simple caste calculations.
2. In the Indian Express, DN Jha on the holiness (or lack thereof) of the cow through the ages.
3. In the Business Standard, Shyam Saran on how we must Make in India as well as defend the idea of India.

Don't Miss...
Akhil Kumar writes that protesters focusing on beef play into the narrative that the Dadri lynching was about meat. But it was really about communal polarisation:
"Despite the efforts of BJP leaders to portray the anger in Dadri as spontaneous, the mob did not get incensed merely because they believed a cow had been killed and someone had eaten beef. There was a context to it: the atmosphere of hatred had been carefully cultivated.

But beef-eating protests and social-media postings about meat play into the BJP's carefully constructed narrative by failing to challenge the larger communal design now in operation. On being asked why he decided to organise the event, Gaurav Jain told The Hindu, “I decided to do a beef picnic in particular because a picnic is marked by sharing food. It is a way of expressing love and friendliness. We need to stop pedestalising beef and restore its original status as a simple food.” Such protests let the people responsible for vitiating the atmosphere off the hook too easily.

They also fail to send a message of solidarity to the vulnerable community. It isn't clear how the Muslim community in Dadri will feel any safer knowing that a bunch of people tried to eat buffalo meat in front of the BJP office or posted Facebook pictures of themselves eating steak."