Kathmandu, March 26

CPN-Maoist Centre Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal today said unification of his party with the CPN-UML should be done on the basis of equal representation and rights.

Talking to top leaders of his party before meeting UML Chairman and Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli at Baluwatar, Dahal said he was in no hurry to unify unless his party was made an equal partner in the unified outfit. He, however, was positive that unification would be completed by the second week of April.

According to sources, PM Oli and Dahal discussed issues related to unification of the two parties. Oli had proposed to complete unification before his India visit which is likely to begin on April 6.

Dahal has been talking to Oli for the past six months on unification issues. The two task forces — one led by senior UML leader Madhav Kumar Nepal and the other headed by senior CPN-MC leader and Minister for Home Affairs Ram Bahadur Thapa — have also been working on party unification. According to a left alliance leader, Thapa-led task force will finalise its task tomorrow and submit its report to the Party Unification Coordination Committee meeting. Nepal-led task force will finalise its report on Wednesday and submit it to PUCC on Thursday.

“Party unification is a tough task. The unification will be done on the basis of equal status for both parties. Unification will not happen even if there’s difference of a single member,” Dahal told student leaders during a training programme organised by CPN-MC-aligned All Nepal Free Student Union Revolutionary in Bhaktapur. “We have agreed that both the chairpersons will co-chair the unified party and will chair the meeting in turns with equal rights.”

Referring to the merger between late Manamohan Adhikari-led CPN-Marxist and Madan Kumar Bhandari-led CPN-Marxist-Leninist on the basis of equal representation in 1991, Dahal said in politics a party was bigger at some point and smaller at the other.

“Once we were bigger than the UML, while the UML is bigger than us now. It is usual in politics. We had discussed equal representation in Rolpa too when we were at war. Even now the unification will happen on the basis of equal representation and rights,” Dahal said.

He said the new party would neither have UML’s multi-party democracy nor CPN-MC’s people’s democracy in the 21st century as its ideology. “We should leave both and devise a new roadmap with socialism as our ideology.”