KATHMANDU, JANUARY 27

Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba has called a virtual meeting tomorrow to discuss formation of the central working committee.

Chief Secretary of NC Headquarters Krishna Prasad Paudel said that the meeting would discuss CWC formation and during the meeting Deuba would nominate 31 central committee members to the CWC. All 14 office bearers of the NC automatically become members of the CWC. The CWC is a powerful body of the party that takes crucial decisions in the absence of central committee meetings.

The Shekhar Koirala faction of the party will raise local elections issues during the meeting. It has said that the party should not delay the local polls on any pretext.

Other partners of the five-party ruling alliance: particularly the Pushpa Kamal Dahal-led CPN-Maoist Centre and Madhav Kumar Nepal-led CPN (Unified Socialist) favour delaying local polls so that elections for all three tiers - federal, provincial, and local - could be held between mid-November 2022 and mid-March 2023. Tenure of local governments ends on May 19.

NC leader Bimalendra Nidhi, however, favoured parliamentary elections first. Nidhi said his long-held view was that federal, provincial, and local polls should be delinked and parliamentary polls be held first. Nidhi said the NC had moved a constitution amendment bill in the Parliament and one of the provisions that the party wanted in the amendment bill was that local polls should be held under the provincial government.

Nidhi said the CPN-MC, Janata Samajbadi Party-Nepal, and Mahantha Thakurled Rastriya Janata Party-Nepal had also supported this proposal of the constitutional amendment bill, but the bill could not be passed due to the CPN-UML opposition.

Nidhi said the CPN-UML had no moral power to oppose the idea of holding parliamentary elections first.

'Former prime minister KP Sharma Oli dissolved the House of Representatives twice. Had the Supreme Court not invalidated his decisions on both occasions, he would have held the HoR election first. As such he has no right to oppose the idea of holding parliamentary elections first,' Nidhi argued. He said he favoured seeking legal and constitutional solution on the basis of political rationale.

A version of this article appears in the print on January 28, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.