Our Gods, your gods

Growing up in the commie land of Kerala in the 70s, we were less aware of caste or religious tensions that characterised much of North India. Such divisions may have been evident at homes in people's minds, in the attitudes and perspectives they carried about other communities but it generally did not leave their verandahs or mouths. People were courteous at the very least.
One incident from my primary school days however was an instance of the  prejudices and intolerance latent in people's minds even then and which the little ones in each family imbibed. I was the oldest and seniormost, say class 3 or 4, among a handful of kids who took the same bus home. We were all students of a one-of-its-kind primary school on the way to Konni and Pathanamthitta. We had Anglo-Indian teachers from Quilon who made us stand in the morning sun everyday and recite English nursery rhymes and the India pledge and national anthem. What I'm coming to say is that there was no tinge of religious instruction in that school run by my dad's friend and professor Babu sir and his father, a priest of the Orthodox Church.
I had been the only Christian in that motley team that made the long arduous walk from school to the bus stop every morning and evening, possibly some 7-8 kilometres.  The rest were Hindu.
One evening as we stood at the bus stop, we chanced upon a small rubbish heap which had a picture of Jesus, probably from the previous year's calendar. My Hindu friends saw it and spat and stamped on the picture hurling abuses. I watched them sadly, feeling outnumbered as well as let down by the hatred they harboured to another's deity. I did not say anything that day. But the next evening the picture was still there and my friends looked a little more mellow, so I took courage to tell them what a hurtful thing they did to my God. They were remorseful after my quiet let-up and went to the  extreme of placing the picture on a stony pedestal on the wayside; some wild flowers and prayers accompanied their apology. That ended the only religious discord I faced in Kerala. Ironically one has more altercations with other Christian sects, each of which believe they are superior in faith to the others.
The reason I remember this now is in article in The Wire by the last Caveman. With a good part of Kerala's Hindu population now under the Hindutva spell, aided by the social media campaigns, it won't be long before the last bastion of secular thoughts is defeated too and its minorities at the receiving end.