Mrs Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister, arrived in London yesterday for a six-day official visit. This will include a weekend al Chequers for confidential talks with Mr Heath and a meeting in London on Monday with Sir Alec Douglas-Home the Foreign and Commonwealth Secretary. She will receive an honorary degree at Oxford on Tuesday before going to Washington next day.

Mrs Gandhi's visit is one of a series to Western capitals in which she is particularly anxious to explain the difficulties of the situation between India and Pakistan.

If is already clear that Mrs Gandhi does not see any need for a United Nations presence in India at present and regards the siting of Indian troops near the frontiers as a purely defensive measure. She does, however, feel that the nine million refugees from East Bengal in India are an international responsibility and not a burden that India can be expected to carry.

Britain is anxious to encourage restraint by India in the face of the risk of warfare with Pakistan and would like Mrs Gandhi to accept a United Nations role in the situation, if only to help to persuade the refugees to return to Pakistan and to assist in the distribution of relief supplies.

Mr Heath is likely to ask for more details of the recent Indo-Soviet treaty which is thought in Whitehall to be a consultative arrangement rather than a commitment to military aid, though Mrs Gandhi at a Brussels press conference earlier in the week appeared to confirm reports that Russia had agreed to supply India with weapons.

After her arrival yesterday Mrs Gandhi spoke of the East Pakistan problem to members of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House. She said there should be talks between the West Pakistan military regime and the accepted elected leaders of East Bengal because only they could find a solution.

She expressed concern that refugees continued to flow into India at the rate of 30,000 a day. Refugees were a financial burden, about which there was international concern, but India was far more concerned with the social and political effects which were a threat to the country's stability and security.

She said that the Indo-Soviet treaty did not conflict with India's policy of non-alignment and pointed out that non-alignment had never meant neutrality or unconcern with the world's problems. It meant merely that India did not automatically follow a military block, but judged each issue on it's merits. She emphasized that India would not offer military bases to the Soviet Union.
Photograph, page 14