Kathmandu, January 2:

The national conference of the Janmorcha Nepal kicked off today with a view to unifying the party with the ruling CPN-Maoist.

The conference, attended by over 380 senior cadres from across the country, is being held at the training centre of the state-owned Nepal Electricity Authority in Kharipati, Bhaktapur.

Janmorcha Nepal, which has seven seats in the Constituent Assembly, is a political front of the CPN-Unity-Centre Masal, which has already decided to unify the party with the CPN-Maoist.

This conference has been organised to garner cadres’ approval for the unification.

Ghanashyam Poudel, general secretary of Janmorcha Nepal, presented a political report to the conference highlighting the urgency of the party’s unification with the CPN-Maoist.

Lilamani Pokharel, one of the central leaders of Janmorcha Nepal, told this daily that general secretary Poudel had shed light on the necessity of bringing the ongoing peace process to a logical end, challenges ahead of for writing a federal, democratic and republican constitution, present-day anarchy on the socio-economic sector and polarisation of Left politics.

“Once the conference adopts the party’s political report, party leadership will have the mandate to go ahead for unification,” Pokharel said.

Both the Janmorcha Nepal and the CPN-Maoist have already reached a theoretical understanding to unify the parties though both the sides have some thorny ideological issues to be settled.

Janmorcha Nepal leadership has been insisting that the Mao-Tse-Tung Thought and Prachanda Path, adopted by the CPN-Maoist, should be discarded and the unified party should abide by the democratic polity.

The Maoist side, however, is believed to have insisted that the contentious ideological issues would be settled by the upcoming unity convention, the date of which would be determined following their unification.