CALCUTTA, June 3 - Indian officials believe that the four million refugees from East Pakistan now in eastern India must eventually return to their homes.

Hopes that the refugees would go back after a few weeks have been crushed by alleged terror tactics of the Pakistan army in East Pakistan, and the Indian government is now planning refugee relief for six months. But the official policy is that India will not be able to care for the new arrivals indefinitely - or absorb them into India's crowded countryside.

"Aid is only a palliative," Col. P. N. Luthra, the man in charge of coordinating relief efforts here, said today. "The refugees must go back. That is the only remedy," he insisted.

Other observers are not confident that the millions driven from their homes will ever be wining to return. They argue that the overwhelming majority of refugees - perhaps 90 per cent of those arriving now - are from East Pakistan's minority of 10 million Hindus and that these Hindus are unlikely to chance living again in Moslem Pakistan.

Many refugees' accounts of their treatment inside East Pakistan also seem to indicate that they were targets of the Pakistan army solely because of their religion. Luthra and other officials believe that foreign powers must pressure Pakistan into allowing refugees to return. "It all depends on the foreign community," Luthra said, "the attention of the world must be focused on the problem."

One irony that strikes officials here is that the better India handles its problems caused by the refugees, the less the world is likely to concern itself. "Because hundreds aren't dying of starvation," one official said, "there seems to be a tendency to ignore the long-range problems."

VIOLENCE FEARED

Like other officials, Luthra believes that eastern India will suffer outbreaks of violence and economic disruption if the refugees do not return to their homes or if they are not carefully controlled by Indian authorities.

"About three-quarters of India lives near the subsistence level," he said. "We cannot spend all our money and concentrate all our attention on the refugees - there must be general economic improvement," he added. The central government and the state government of West Bengal are now beginning to plan "transit camps" for the refugees. These will be designed to provide better and more permanent shelter than that available in the present camps close to the India-Pakistan border.

However, the planning, let alone construction, has not been able to keep up with the flow of refugees. Initially, at least, it will not be able to find space for all the four million. There is a shortage of open land In West Bengal high enough not to flood during the seasonal rains which usually begin this week. And farmers are unwilling to give up agriculturally valuable land.

In addition to flooding camps in low-lying areas, the seasonal rains, or monsoons, will greatly increase the problems of supplying refugees in Assam and Tripura - where small gauge railroads and roads are often blocked by landslides once the rains start. Like West Bengal, Assam and Tripura are rice-deficit states in normal times and have to be supplied with food from other parts of India.

POLITICAL PROBLEMS

Political control of the refugees also troubles Indian officials. Most of those who have fled are farmers and would be likely recruits for the West Bengal Communist Party Marxist (CPM), the state's largest party. The non- communist state coalition government and New Delhi are eager to see that Communist political organizers are kept out of the refugee camps.

In additions there have been reports of Pakistani agitators mingling with the refugees and trying to exacerbate Hindu-Moslem resentments.

Pakistan has portrayed the refugee exodus as an Indian- instigated attempt to play upon the long-standing religious friction.

About 8 minion Moslems live in West Bengal and there have been scattered reports of Moslem alarm at the large numbers of desperately poor Hindus moving into camps close to their homes and fields. Indian police found a collection of spears. axes and knives in one mosque recently.

Among those non-official Indian observers here who believe that most refugees will never return to East Pakistan, a minority is not convinced that India will not be able to absorb the new arrivals.

"We will not cope by your standards," one man said, "but by Indian standards the refugees will manage and they will be dispersed through the country. We already have more than 540 million people, we can survive with a few million more."