partition and their first war over Kashmir, New Delhi imposed a trade embargo to choke off the nascent Pakistani state—a legacy that has cautiously begun to be repaired since the late 1990s. Regionally, too, India to its detriment appears unable to purposefully engage within the current Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership negotiations, despite the gradual evisceration by the West of the most-favoured-nation principle in the multilateral system.

A once integrated subcontinent is now among the least integrated spaces in the world. India must take the lead in restoring the economic unity of the subcontinent. The subcontinent’s economic links to East Asia remain insubstantial. India must exercise a leadership role in constructing multiple lines of communication that imaginatively network the subcontinent with production processes and final markets in East Asia andChina and Rome. Asia’s seas were a genuine mare liberum (free sea) that no sovereign sought to control. The spread of Buddhism from South Asia along the ‘belt’ and ‘road’ wove a common world of religious-cultural ambiance and sensibility that signified both integration and cosmopolitanism.

Standing in the UNESCO offices in March 2014, Chinese President Xi Jinping extolled the profound impact of Buddhism on China. For his part, Modi, a firm devotee of the Buddha, commenced his recent China tour at a shrine built to commemorate a famous Chinese Buddhist monk who had visited his ancestral village in Gujarat during the Tang Dynasty era. A 21st century infrastructure project geared to connect the Asian heartland to its hinterland and beyond might yet revive a set of loose integrative norms,