KATHMANDU, MARCH 9
CPN (Unified Socialist) Chair Madhav Kumar Nepal today said that the ruling coalition partners had agreed to contest the upcoming local polls on the basis of the current coalition.
He made these remarks at the party's Central Committee meeting today.
Nepali Congress Vice-president Purna Bahadur Khadka, however, refuted Nepal's statement saying that his party's Central Working Committee would take a call on whether or not it should enter seat arrangements with other coalition partners.
"We are going to voters without the agenda of seat sharing arrangements. We will talk of poll alliance only if our party decides on the need for it," Khadka said at a press conference organised here today.
The NC launched a month-long local election campaign ' Ghar ghar jaun Congress jitaun (Let's go to every household and ensure Congress victory) from next week.
NC Spokesperson Prakash Sharan Mahat said at the press conference that central leaders would go to all the districts to oversee poll activities. He said the NC would interact with voters, assess their needs and make election manifestos in the local levels as per their need and would solicit votes on the basis of the party's programmes for the next five years. NC local committees will be mainly deployed during the month-long campaign.
The party will decide on entering into seat sharing arrangements
Mahat said party leaders and cadres would also remove doubts from the minds of the people about the recently ratified Millennium Challenge Corporation deal that Nepal signed with the United States of America.
There was a campaign to spread falsehood and rumour against the MCC deal. Even after the deal was ratified, there were some forces spreading rumours.
We are going to tell people the truth, Mahat said and added that MCC was purely a development project which would set a new precedent in Nepal on the basis of which Nepal government would be able to get a fair deal from other donors in the future.
Asked to comment about CPN-UML Chair KP Sharma Oli's opposition to the Election Commission's plan to use green ballot papers, Sharma said, "Divided UML is afraid of green colour." Oli recently said that the green ballot paper could give advantage to Nepali Congress, which has tree as its election symbol.
A version of this article appears in the print on March 10, 2022, of The Himalayan Times
