The West Asian problem is nowhere near solution today, but, at the same time, they will have to go by certain principles and those principles are, complete withdrawal from the occupied areas and the acceptance of the national rights of the Palestine people. There, we should try to prevent division. The unity of the Arab world is more important for us. We should not do or say anything, contrary to the concept. I want to make this one point very clear that we should not do or say anything which will go contrary to it. This is exactly what is happening. Now, take the tragedy of Lebanon; it is difficult to explain and we can only express our best wishes that they find a solution for it. Somebody asked what is the Asian approach to it. The Middle East issue is such that it arouses global interest; it is a global responsibility and we cannot really speak of an Asian approach. We find almost all the Asian countries wanting a solution, we are working on these lines in the U. N. and we hope we will succeed some time. But there are other matters also. There are contradictions, as was mentioned, in South East Asia; there are contradictions in the sub-continent - and some of them are being encouraged.
I must mention two things about Pakistan and the continous anti-India propaganda in which the leadership of Pakistan is engaged. Whenever they get an opportunity they have to say that India is expansionist. I don’t know what we did to be called ‘expansionist’. We supported the liberation of Bangladesh and you know what is happening in Bangladesh now; what is expansionist about it? Mr. Bhutto - I am mentioning his name - recently gave his latest theory about he partition of India. While addressing the National Assembly of Pakistan, he said that united India was a danger of Afghanistan and, therefore, in order to protect Afghanistan from that danger, they had created Pakistan ! We wish them good relations; we never wanted any bad relations.
I think the Simla Agreement was going on quite all right but it got halted because sophisticated weapons started coming. This is a curse to humanity. Whenever a country thinks that it can solve its national problems by sophisticated weapons coming from outside, that is the end of the national progress of that country.