KATHMANDU, JUNE 18

The ruling alliance and the main opposition CPN-UML continue to blame each other for expressing Nepal's willingness to join the United States State Partnership Programme.

CPN (Unified Socialist) Chair Madhav Kumar Nepal said at a programme here today that the CPN-UML was responsible for moving the United States State Partnership Programme ahead.

Addressing a programme here today, Nepal said the letter written by the then army chief Rajendra Chhetri to US Ambassador Alaina B Teplitz proved that the letter was written when the UML was in power.

General Chhetri had written the letter on 27 October 2015 to the US Ambassador for Nepal's participation in the SPP. He added that he wanted the facts related to SPP to come out.

Nepal said he and other coalition leaders - CPN-Maoist Centre Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, another CPN-MC leader Narayan Kaji Shrestha and Janata Samajbadi Party-Nepal Chair Upendra Yadav - discussed today that they should raise the issue with Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba to bring the facts related to the SPP out.

CPN-UML leader Pradeep Kumar Gyawali, however, said at a programme here today that there was no written evidence to support that the Nepali Army intimated the political leaders before writing letters to the American authorities about Nepal's willingness to join the SPP.

As far as I know, the NA wrote to the defence ministry seeking its instruction on the US proposal for SPP participation and the defence ministry wrote back to the NA telling it to include one representative from the ministry, Gyawali said, 'The defence ministry's response to the NA shows that it merely took this as an exchange programme,' he said.

Gyawali said that the political leadership was not aware of the NA's communication with American authorities, including American's Asia Pacific Command, and perhaps the NA thought that it had already informed the defence ministry and it did not need to communicate further with government authorities.

Gyawali said that the standard procedure has to be followed on diplomatic proposals seeking the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Law Ministry's opinion about the consequence of Nepal's action on any international commitment.

A version of this article appears in the print on June 19, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.