Days after she faced flak for stating that ministers in the Maharashtra government had just been sworn in and had not started making money, state minister Yashomati Thakur courted controversy again by claiming that touching a cow drives away negativity. Thakur, MLA from Teosa and Women and Child Development minister in the Uddhav Thackeray government, was speaking at a function in Amravati, over 690 kilometres from here, on Saturday.

“Our culture says if you touch a cow, all negativity will go away,” she told the gathering. Earlier, campaigning for the Vashim Zilla Parishad polls, she had said “we have just come to power, our pockets are not warm enough yet”. She had also said that voters may accept money from the opposition but must vote for the Congress.