the materials. We welcome help from outside but, as I said, if giving help means that people are going to think only of the refugees and forget the main problem, then it will not help the refugees and it will not help India. Of course, it will not help Bangladesh either, because we want the refugees to return, and we are fully aware that they cannot possibly return unless more refugees stop coming. Today, they number more than 9,000,000 but every single day we have 30,000 or 40,000 new refugees coming in. The stream has not ended by any means, and each group comes with new stories of sorrow which are hair-raising.
So, the first step is that conditions should be created within East Bengal so that more people do not want to leave their homes and their homeland. Then comes the second step of asking these people to go back. The question is whether this is possible in the conditions which exist today and, obviously, it is not possible, because otherwise they would have stopped. We are told in India that we should accept observers from the United Nations. It does not really make very much difference. Perhaps some of you are not aware that we already have ten of them. We have ten observers from the United Nations High Commission for Relief and they have been there since the very beginning. We have nothing to hide and the border, as well as the camps, are open to all the foreign correspondents who visit us time and again. You who are living in England have seen the reports being published in the British newspapers and perhaps you know that similar reports are being published by the American newspapers, by many countries in Europe and other parts of the world. So the version that is coming out is not an Indian version. It is the version of eye-witness who have seen these things for themselves. As a matter of fact, most of our information comes from these people. We hardly have any way of having our own information except from the refugees and those people who come from there.
This is a very grave problem for us. It does not concern merely India-it concerns Asia and it concerns the world. Everybody today is busy telling us that we must show restraint. I do not think that any people or any Government could have shown greater restraint than we have in the face of such tremendous provocation and threat to our safety and to our stability. But where has the restraint taken us? With all our restraint we are not getting any nearer to a solution. On the contrary, the military confrontation, as the other confrontations which I mentioned, political, economic, social, administrative, are steadily getting worse.
People have asked me how long can India manage? Actually that date has long since been passed. I feel that I am sitting on the top of a volcano and I honestly do not know when it is going to erupt. So the question is not of how restrained we are today, but of what will happen across the border. We think this is the responsibility of the international community to see that a way out is found. Obviously, the best way, the most humane way, is to have a political settlement and that political settlement can only be with the elected leader of the people of Bangladesh, and with the elected and accepted representatives of that country.
