Kathmandu, May 12:

Top CPN-M and CPN-UML leaders today indicated displeasure at the way Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala was going about since the last one year. He has been accused of “delaying constituent assembly election and maintaining an anti-people stance.”

“People want the country declared a republic. This hasn’t been done one year on. Worse, no eight-party meeting has been called after the Election Commission (EC) expressed its inability to hold the election in May,” said Jhala Nath Khanal, UML Standing Committee member, at the Reporters’ Club.

However, he was of the view that Nepal will be a republican state sooner or later. Saying that the announcement could come sooner if only leaders willed it, Khanal predicted that monarchy certainly cannot last beyond the first meeting of the constituent assembly.

Maoist leader Prabhakar went to the extent of branding Koirala a “villain of the people” for the way he has been “sitting on the reports submitted by commissions after commissions and also disrupting the political process.”

“We are being accused of disrupting the parliamentary process. But the reality is the parliamentary disruption is the culmination of the disruption of the political process,” Prabhakar, who is CPN-M whip in the parliament, said, adding his party will declare the country a republic from the House “very soon”.

Earlier, NC (D) leader Dr Prakash Sharan Mahat insisted the election cannot take place unless there is a conducive atmosphere. Hridayesh Tripathi of the Nepal Sadbhavana Party warned that problem of the Tarai “should not be deemed resolved until a delimitation of the constituencies is ordered afresh”.