Ready for poll tie up with UML, DSP-N or other parties
KATHMANDU, OCTOBER 1
The executive committee of the Janata Samajwadi Party-Nepal today decided to keep itself open to seat sharing with parties other than the four ruling coalition partners - the Nepali Congress, CPN-Maoist Centre, CPN (Unified Socialist) and Rastriya Janamorcha.
JSP-N Spokesperson Manish Kumar Suman today issued a press release saying the party's executive committee had concluded that the ongoing seat sharing dialogue among the ruling coalition partners was not satisfactory and hence the party should keep its option open to seat sharing agreements with other parties.
If we fail to have poll tie ups with other parties, we will contest the upcoming parliamentary and provincial elections alone, the JSP-N stated in its release.
The ruling parties have been working for weeks to finalise seat sharing agreement, but have not reached a conclusion yet. Suman said that his party had demanded 32 first-past-the-post Parliamentary seats out of 165, but the other coalition partners offered only 11 seats. Suman said that his party wanted at least 20 FPTP seats in the Tarai districts.
"Intra-party wrangling in the NC and the CPN-MC's arrogance of being a big partner has complicated the seat sharing arrangement in the ruling coalition," Suman said, adding that all the coalition partners could get a respectable deal only if the 2017 House of Representatives election results, the results of the recent local polls and the management of top leaders of the coalition partners were taken into account.
JSP-N Chair Upendra Yadav said his party wanted the ruling alliance partners to leave at least those FPTP constituencies where the JSP-N had won in the last general elections for his party, but the other coalition partners did not accept the proposal. Yadav said that now his party was ready to hold dialogue with the KP Sharma Oli-led CPN-UML and Mahantha Thakur-led Democratic Socialist Party-Nepal for seat sharing agreement. In the last general election, the JSP-N had won 10 FPTP seats.
A DSP-N source said there was no possibility of poll tie up with the JSP-N because Upendra Yadav was not a credible leader.
"Yadav cannot be trusted because he changes his stance anytime," the source said and added that even now the JSP-N had not withdrawn from the five-party alliance and its statement could just be a bargaining tool. The source said the DSP-N was talking to UML leaders for seat sharing agreement.
The Thakur-led DSP-N lawmakers were with the JSP-N, but the Thakur-led leaders split from the JSP-N and formed a separate party DSP-N after Thakur and leaders close to him supported the KP Sharma Oli government during the power struggle that led to a split of the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) and dissolution of the House of Representatives.
CPN-UML leader Subas Chandra Nembang said his party was ready to talk to JSP-N for sharing FPTP seats in the upcoming parliamentary and provincial polls.
A version of this article appears in the print on October 2, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.
