It seems very strange to us how the situation can be normalized by suddenly declaring that some elected people are no longer there when they are very much in the world. You suddenly say that you going to have new elections and that new elections are going to solve the problem. They cannot possibly solve the problem. The elections were not considered illegal when they were held, the programme put before the people was well known to the Government and the elections were presided over by the same governmental authority. They had a six-point programme on which they fought the elections and which was supported by the vast majority of the people of both sides of Pakistan. Nobody objected to it. The time to raise an objection was before the elections were fought. They could have said, “well, we don’t approve of this programme, we are not going to accept the six points and, therefore, if you want to fight the elections you will have to re-think”. I do not know if it would have been proper, but certainly if any objection had to be raised, that was the time to raise it, not when the programme was accepted. The people thought it was accepted any they voted accordingly.
Today, India is faced with a very grave situation. Honestly, I cannot prophesy what will happen or how we can deal with it. I can only see that from day to day the situation is worsening. The crisis is becoming more acute. India is a country which has always stood against war. We have always believed that problems and disputes can be solved by negotiation and by discussions. But there is such a thing as national interest and we cannot allow our national interest, the interest of the people, of their security and their stability, to suffer. This is the situation. But, as I have said to my people in India, which I would like to repeat to all Indians here, the grave the situation becomes, the greater the necessity to be calm and collected and think things out with a cool head. Whatever happens, we must look not only at the near future but at the distant future. We in India will naturally take all those steps which are necessary to secure the sort of future which we have hoped for and worked for before Independence and after Independence.
I want only to say that living at this distance, people see only our faults, our short comings, our weaknesses, our quarrels. All these things do exists. We do not want to hide them. We do not hide them. But if you think this is the whole of India, you will be very sadly mistaken. We may have sixteen languages or we may have more languages, that is not important. Each one of those languages serves a population as large as any country in Europe. We do not want regimentation, we do not want uniformity. But the fact remains that under all these fissiparous tendencies. demands, divisions, agitations which are constantly taking place, there is a very strong base of Indian unity. There is also a strong base of self-confidence. Time and again we were told that we could not do something and we have shown that we could do it and we did do it. I spoke to you about our freedom struggle. I spoke to you about democracy. I see ‘that’ here is a question in ‘India Weekly’ that India will never be able to feed its growing population. Well, this year, 1971, we are fully self-sufficient in food, even though we have paid attention only to wheat and rice. We still have to do a lot of research, we still have to increase production in all kinds of other fields. We were told that planning would not work, and planning certainly has its
