Kathmandu, February 9
The CPN-Maoist Centre will discuss a proposal among the party's rank and file in the next two months to change its name and election symbol, if necessary.
The proposal prepared by the party's Organisation Department, in consultation with party Chair and Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, will be discussed at all levels of the party's structures, according to CPN-MC headquarters' Secretary Dor Prasad Upadhyay.
Upadhyay said the party would adopt a new name and election symbol only if party committees and cadres supported the proposal.
"Our leaders are of the view that if there is a need for broader left unity or forging alliance between forces supporting republican system, others may not agree for unity or alliance without seeing the CPN-MC change its name and election symbol," Upadhyay added. Civil society members had been suggesting that the CPN-MC should drop Maoist from its name as the party had joined the political mainstream.
Meanwhile, the CPN-MC held a virtual meeting of its central committee where Dahal sought members' opinion on his nine-page political paper that he had presented at the standing committee meeting recently.
In the political paper, Dahal has stated that the party should be careful and sensitive about the challenge the government was facing due to the rift between major parties of the ruling coalition at a time when his government had got support of almost 99.25 per cent lawmakers in the House of Representatives during the vote of confidence.
This can be interpreted as the PM's concern about the fallout of a rift between hisparty and the CPN-UML over who should be the next president.
While the UML has been saying that it would field candidate for the president's post in the presidential election, CPN-MC leaders have been saying that the next president should be a person acceptable to all forces.
CPN-MC is also saying that there should be national consensus on the presidential candidate to reflect the near consensus seen during the vote of confidence.
The Nepali Congress, which is the main opposition party, also voted in favour of Dahal, raising UML's hackles. UML leaders think that the NC voted for Dahal in order to create a rift in the seven-party alliance and prevent a UML candidate from winning the presidential election.
Dahal said the party's vote share had declined over the years - it got more than 3.1 million votes in the 2008 Constituent Assembly, 1,439,000 votes in the 2017 parliamentary election, and 1,175,000 votes in the recently held parliamentary elections. "More deplorable is the fact that we have not been able to get proportional representation votes in districts equal to the number of our party members," Dahal stated in his paper.
Dahal said while lack of cohesion among party leaders was one reason for he poor showing in November 20 polls, reluctance of Nepali Congress supporters to vote for CPN-MC candidates in constituencies where NC did not field its candidates was another reason for the party's loss of vote share.
Dahal stated in his paper that the party should make efforts to unify like-minded left parties. He, however, added that merger with other parties would be formalised without undermining senior party colleagues.
A version of this article appears in the print on February 10, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.
