For a flickering moment in the last week of November, it seemed as if Congress provocateur and Punjab Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu might set the geopolitical agends, when he unabashedly spoke of the need for India and Pakistan to mend fences. He was in Lahore on the occasion of the start of work on the Kartarpur corridor meant to ease the travel of Sikh pilgrims to the resting place of Guru Nanak. Peace in the Subcontinent presupposes amity between India and Pakistan and more than 40 years of efforts at regionalism has been held hostage by hostility of the two with the other countries watching askance. The abuse hurled by the state establishments of each side is a populist political tool that distracts the public from pressing matters of growth, equity, democracy and accountability. That the cost of maintaining massive militaries in each country drags down efforts at social justice is lost in the fog of ultra-naturalism. India, as the more stable democracy should inculcate empathy for the the neighbour but the New Delhi commentariat tends not to recognise the difference between the Pakistani state and its people, the latter struggling against extremism, military supremacy and state-centralism all at one go. Indian media by and large is not bothered by the travails of the Pakistanis, as right-wing trolls rule the airwaves and social media. The trolling and abuse on all matters related to Pakistan can be expected to peak as India's general election of 2019 draws near, which will only help Islamabad's military-intelligence complex tighten its grip on the society. It is high time to try once again for a plan for South asian regionalism. The potential of South Asia sustained high growth has been blocked by the tightened national borders, with India playing its part by building barbed wire fences on the Pakistan and Bangladesh frontiers. In all of seven decades, the economic history of the Sub-continent has been forgotten with the ultra-nationalist narrative having us believe that this separate living is how it has always been. Until Cyril Radcliffe drew the map of Partition, the economic synergy across the different parts of the Sub-continent was an unquestioned reality. There is no one to remember or remind that this reality of sealed borders was set up only in 1947 for most parts of the sub-continent or that the door actually slammed shut only after the India-Pakistan war of 1965.