Gujarat’s former deputy chief minister Nitin Patel was spearheading, in August, the Har Ghar Tiranga rally at Kadi town, Mehsana district, when a stray cow charged at the procession. It brushed past Patel, who fell down and suffered a minor fracture in his left leg. Last month, charitable trusts running gaushalas, or cow shelters, set free hundreds of bovines in Banaskantha and Patan districts, leading to traffic snarls. These trusts were protesting against the Gujarat government’s failure to release Rs 500 crore promised to them for taking care of mostly abandoned cows.

Television can be exploited to rig people’s minds. But it can also be harnessed to beneficially influence social attitudes. For instance, exposure to cable television lowered women’s acceptability of spousal abuse and preference for sons, and enhanced their autonomy in Tamil Nadu. These benefits were outcomes of Chief Minister M Karunanidhi’s 2006 decision to distribute colour TV sets free to the poor, as academicians Robert Jensen and Emily Oster found in their survey there.