Indian warning over refugees

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32637, 19 June 1971, Page 17

Indian warning over refugees

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter—Copyright) WASHINGTON, June 18. The Indian Foreign Min-, ister (Mr Swaran Singh) gave a warning today that the thousands of. Pakistanis flooding across the Indian border—at the rate, he said, of one a second—threatened to “engulf our region in a conflict, the end of which it is not easy to predict.” In a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, Mr Singh said that his Government had faced with patience the influx of about six million Pakistanis who had already sought refuge in India. “But,” he said, “we cannot sit idly by if the edifice of our political stability and economic wellbeing is threatened.”

Mr Singh did not say what action his Government would take. He appealed for an international effort to persuade the Pakistan Government to end "its bloodbath” in East Pakistan. ■The Pakistan Government is clearly the government of a minority, equipped with gifts of money and arms from abroad, and trying to undo, through the use of brute force, the verdict of popular vote,” he declared. “ ... It is immediately necessary to stop the further influx of refugees from Pakistan, and that will come about only If the military action in East Bengal is ended forthwith.”