Washington: Did the Civil War ever really end in America? Did Partition settle the national identity question in India? Or do they remain open wounds in the world’s largest two democracies?

Those who live in India would agree that the issue of what exactly should be the nation’s primary identity is hardly a settled matter. That might be the only thing the two sides in the argument would agree on. One camp insists that the Partition of India was a defining moment at which the Muslims chose to have a separate nation carved out for them and therefore the remaining portion of India that is Bharat should be an unapologetic Hindu nation. The other side says the Constitution of India was drawn up in the manner it was because the republic of India would affirm a kind of secularism that would continue to accommodate Hindus and Muslims, as well as Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and what have you, in direct contrast to the religion-defined profile of Pakistan.

Between the two nations the argument has continued for seven decades, violently, over the state of Jammu & Kashmir. Within the Indian republic, it is a critical fault line between major political parties and ideological camps. Who do we call an Indian? What truly is the idea of India?

Today the argument, which has waxed and waned over the decades, is at a high pitch. Subsets of questions keep surfacing: Who is a true Hindu? Do Dalits accept they are part of the Hindu family? If they do, why are so many fleeing to Buddhism? Does Hinduism have a fixed contour defined by the Vedas or is it a collection of traditions and practices which some 18th and 19th century scholars and nationalist leaders defined as a collective identity? Should Muslims have personal laws in a secular state? Must all Hindus be vegetarian? Do all Hindus share a singular identity? Do all Muslims? The argument, often violent, is not over.

In the United States, the northern states and the south fought violently in the 19th century over the southerners’ assumed entitlement, in the name of states’ rights, to own slaves and to continue treating African Americans as less than human. Around seven hundred thousand died in the Civil War which ended in 1865. But did the argument end with the north’s victory?

No. Without going into details that can be found in history books, the southern states of the so-called Confederacy quickly established a system of effective apartheid. The southern states, after a period of reconstruction following the war, imposed local and state laws that from 1896 ensured continuing racial segregation. The system was not fully undone until the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1963 and ’64. But that was hardly the end of racial hatred in America.

To cut the story short, hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi white nationalists, who were presumed to be on the fringes of the socio-political spectrum, are openly enjoying a revival. After many had prematurely assumed that racism in America had been buried once for all by the election of Barack Obama as president, several observers now feel that the spell of eight years under an African American leader heightened fears among those who felt that their vision of a white America was rapidly fading, a fear deepened by the continuing influx of brown immigrants from south of the border and other parts of the world.

So they put in power a man who spoke their language of intolerance of minorities punctuated by racist dog whistles. The Klan and the so-called alt-right have welcomed his tone on racial matters and assemble now in public without face masks. Meanwhile, an anarchist “Antifa” or anti-fascist movement on the far left has become a source of gratuitous violence that has alarmed moderates and quickly been denounced by the president and his supporters as pre-planned leftist disruption of law and order.

In short, the world’s two largest democracies are straining at the seams. How they tackle the rise of violently divisive intolerance might affect the future of democracy across the world.