We are not a country of beggars and elephants and snakecharmers.

This is a new India of Whatsapp and smartphones and MyGov.in. That’s the Digital India Narendra Modi sold, to a starstruck Silicon Valley just the other day.

Mr Modi told an inspiring story about an India where farmers in Maharashtra are on a Whatsapp group to share agricultural tips and techniques.

Days later barbaric violence erupted in Dadri village, not too far from Delhi. A mob, apparently fired up by announcements of cow slaughter made at the local temple, barged into the house of the Muslim ironsmith, convinced that he had beef in his refrigerator. Soon the iron smith was dead, his son in hospital and #DadriLynching was the latest hashtag of shame on Twitter.

It sounds medieval but this too was powered by Whatsapp and social media.

The villagers of Bisada, writes Betwa Sharma in Huffington Post, have pictures of meat and bones, clinching proof in their minds that Mohammad Akhlaq’s family slaughtered a cow. “The photos have spread like wildfire across the village, and almost everyone has images on their own phones,” writes Sharma. Pictures circulated via Whatsapp.

Vandana Rana, the sister of Vishal Rana who has been named in the police FIR as being part of the lynch mob, tells Supriya Sharma of Scroll that she often gets messages and videos on the subject of cow slaughter. “The videos are from Kashmir, from Muzzafarnagar, basically from Mohammedan areas, where cows are being killed,” she says. She gets the images via Whatsapp.

Whatsapp is just technology. It’s neither good nor bad. It just depends on how we use it – to share farming tips or get blood boiling. The government is not unaware of its power for rumourmongering. At the height of the Hardik Patel reservation agitation in Gujarat, there was a clampdown on social media, such as Whatsapp and Facebook.