By emphasising this, I do not want to underestimate in any way the effort that this country has to make to strengthen its own defence forces; that will have to be done. When we look at the world today, we see some new trends as compared to the position obtained many years hack. The year 1962 seems to be a year of significance. That year produced two very significant events— one was in Cuba and the other was the Chinese aggression on India. I think the world has started appearing rather different, in very clear terms; not that it has started changing from that moment onwards, the forces were already working in that direction, but it started making a little different turn from the time of those two events.How? May be it is my personal assessment of the problem, may he, it is my impression of the problem, but I say that after these two events one can very clearly say that despite the conflict of ideologies, despite the historical enemities, many countries are coming together to save the world from war.
 

It is a very important thing, and it has created a very fundamental issue for us— I will come to that point and I will also try to explain how this point is connected with our own problem of defence— because, even countries believing in the principles of Communism and countries which are, really speaking, dead set against the principles of Communism are thinking on the same lines that it is necessary to co-exist. That has created a problem in the world in the form of China, because that seems to be the only country today which ideologically believes that there should be a war. Here I am talking of ideological beliefs– a country which is fundamentally emphasising the need for war and other countries, though they may believe in the same ideology, having come to the conclusion for all practical purposes that they must avoid war. Unfortunately, as geo-politics have placed us, the country which believes in the fundamental principle of having war happens to be our next door neighbour. That has given some sort of inevitability to the necessity of preparation of defence of our country. That is the only point which I wanted to mention.

There is no escape from making a conscious effort and being alert in order to safeguard the integrity of this country from this neighbour. It started with the border trouble. Let us hope the Chinese Government will accept the Colombo proposals and some solution will be found. In that case, our Government will be very happy about.

But, apart from that, there appears to be something, an inherent defect, which we have to be aware of. Therefore, I am one with the feeling that this House has expressed, that feeling of concern about the defence of country, that new awareness, that new alertness, that new consciousness about the defence effort. It is something good for our country that such a big war effort, I would rather say defence effort, is getting unanimous support of this hon. House, in spite of the fact that there are very heavy taxation proposals. Though there may he individual grumblings, the country as a whole has given unanimous support to these proposals, because it knows that it is a very desirable and necessary effort for the defence of our country. Once we accept this position, that defence efforts of this size have to be continued, then certainly, we have to think about how to do that.