THE best one can hope for the traditional annual New York summit of the prime ministers of Pakistan and India is that they put the peace process back on the rails.

Both Nawaz Sharif and Narendra Modi, committed to attend the UN General Assembly session in September, are expected to take advantage of the opportunity to renew a dialogue which had a rather fitful start in New Delhi on May 27.

There was uncertainty even on a meeting of the foreign secretaries. A cordial exchange of letters could not conceal the big divide. Modi wrote that he hoped to work closely with Sharif and his government “in an atmosphere free from confrontation and violence”.

The Indo-Pak backchannel must be revived.

The sub-text is not a state secret. It has three elements — substantial progress in the Mumbai blasts trial; calm on the LoC in Kashmir; and real progress on the trade front.

The last involves opening the Wagah-Attari border 24/7 for trade, allowing container cargo movements across the border and granting Non-Discriminatory Market Access to India. The last was agreed in 2013, before the elections in Pakistan and reaffirmed by the foreign ministers of the two countries in January. Accord on this can go a long way to reduce the trust deficit.

Last May, shortly after Nawaz Sharif’s visit to India, foreign affairs adviser Sartaj Aziz, a born conciliator, made a constructive suggestion at a media briefing. Pakistan was open to “renaming and restructuring” the 17-year-old composite dialogue instituted by the joint statement at Islamabad in 1987. “The [peace process] agenda has to be updated and restructured. The entire process has to be reviewed.” The composite dialogue format “had become redundant”.

Dawn reported after the briefing that “Mr Sharif, according to [a] source, is proposing to take Kashmir and terrorism out of the official-level talks and place them on the agenda of discussions at the level of political leadership”.

A sound decision but a half-step. Two other issues have long ceased to be matters for discussion. They are low-hanging fruits. The prime ministers have but to decide to resolve them. Absence of such a resolve cannot be compensated by any number of summits.

Looking back, it is clear that form has prevailed over substance in devising the structure of the India Pakistan dialogue. The charter of the composite dialogue, embodied in the Islamabad joint statement of June 1987, was flawed at its inception. I.K. Gujral, a hawk of hawks in the plumage of a dove, was against even a substantive dialogue on Kashmir; let alone any concessions which would make settlement possible.

The dispute over Jammu & Kashmir was to be addressed by foreign secretaries. He wrecked even this fractured structure at the Saarc summit in 1998.

Para 3 of the draft Agra declaration of July 2001 provided for “a sustained dialogue at the political level” on Kashmir, terrorism and “peace and security”. There were to be annual summit-level meetings and biannual meetings of the foreign ministers.

Ignored in the discourse is an instructive failure. It is the agreement on a joint commission signed at New Delhi in March 1983 by Sahibzada Yaqub Khan and P.V. Narasimha Rao. It soon went into hibernation but was revived after two decades in October 2005 in Islamabad when eight working groups were formed on agriculture, tourism, health, information technology, environment information and education.

In February 2008, eight areas were broadly defined for the groups to work on. These are far more specific than the categories listed in para 4 of the joint statement of 1997.

Article 1 of the agreement for the joint commission covers them. But now nobody mentions this body. The cross-LoC trade is a sham. Without banking and telephonic facilities it barely survives on barter. The visa regime sorely needs to be eased.

These steps alone will go a long way towards lessening tensions, especially if backed by visits to each other’s country by influential businessmen, entrepreneurs, scholars, professionals, poets, musicians, artists and TV and film stars.

Both prime ministers would do well to discard their allergy to everything which their respective predecessor government attempted or achieved. In particular, the Shaharyar Khan-Satindra Lambah backchannel must be revived. It has done much good and holds promise.

Between now and the prime ministers’ meeting next September, officials can usefully prepare the ground for a significant breakthrough in New York. No preparatory work can go far unless the leaders decide to make use of it.

The joint commission and composite dialogue experiment teach us that institutions or formats for dialogue can be rendered irrelevant if the leaders are not in a negotiating frame of mind. If they are, they need no ‘mechanism’. They can just talk and settle using the mechanism, if at all, to fix the details.

The writer is an author and lawyer based in Mumbai.

Published in Dawn, July 19th, 2014