Kathmandu, February 25

The Parliamentary Hearing Committee today confirmed that Samim Miya Ansari, who has been proposed to head the Muslim Commission, has different dates on his citizenship certificate and record file of district office after it received documents from district administrative office of Kathmandu.

PHC had sought details of Ansari’s citizenship certificate from Kathmandu DAO after receiving complaints against him from the public.

According to the DAO report, Ansari’s original date of birth in the registration file in the district office is 10 October 1980. But his date of birth on the citizenship certificate he sent to the Constitutional Council was 10 October 1973.

The chairperson of Muslim Commission has to be 45 years old.

“We found different dates on his citizenship and sent a written statement to the Parliament,” Bashu Dev Ghimire of Kathmandu DAO told THT. PHC Chairperson Laxman Lal Karna said PHC would go through all the evidences it had received.

Apart from discrepancies in his citizenship certificate, there are other reasons why Ansari is ineligible to head the Muslim Commission.

The Election Commission of Nepal has stated that Ansari was a Nepal Communist Party (NCP) candidate under the proportional representation electoral system for the House of Representatives in 2017. “His name was included in the closed list of the PR from the Muslim community and as such he could not be eligible for a constitutional post,” a source in PHC Secretariat told THT. Ansari’s name was proposed for the commission without removing it from the PR list and he is yet to resign from the party.

Ansari, a resident of Kathmandu, joined the erstwhile CPN-UML after quitting RastriyaJanata Party-Nepal prior to local level polls in 2017. He became a Central Committee member of NCP after CPN-UML and CPN-Maoist Centre merged on May 17.