NCP co-chairs Dahal, Oli now fighting an ‘ideological battle’

KATHMANDU, JULY 21

A few days ago Co-chair of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) and Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli told another Co- chair of the party Pushpa Kamal Dahal that if he wanted to become the new NCP chairman he should agree to his proposal of holding the party’s General Convention in November and also to the people’s multi-party democracy that the erstwhile CPN-UML had championed before it merged with the Maoist Centre.

But Dahal refused to go for PMPD. Dahal-led CPN-MC had championed the cause of people’s democracy of 21 century adopted in the Chunbang meeting held 15 years ago. Dahal had propounded this ideology.

Former UML leaders, including Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence Ishwar Pokharel, have occasionally made a strong pitch for PMPD.

PMPD was propounded by former general secretary of the erstwhile UML Madan Kumar Bhandari. It was adopted by the fifth general convention of the party held from 27 January to 2 February 1993. PMPD espouses multi-party competition, pluralism, separation of powers, supremacy of the constitution and the rule of law.

According to NCP Central Committee member Ram Prasad Sapkota, who was with the CPN-MC before its merger with the UML, the main difference between PMPD and people’s democracy of 21st century is that the former allows multi-party competition while the latter allows competition only among communist parties.

People’s democracy of 21 century also believes in use of force to capture state power.

After the CPN-UML and CPN-Maoist Centre merged to create the NCP, party leaders said they would create a new ideology amalgamating the two ideologies. Dahal and other NCP leaders, who were formerly associated with the CPN-MC, have said on multiple occasions that there was a need to create a new ideology for the new era, but some leaders who were formerly associated with the UML, including Ishwar Pokharel, have time and again made a strong pitch for PMPD.

NCP leader Haribol Gajurel, who was formerly associated with the CPN-MC, said there was need to formulate new strategies to achieve the goals of socialism. “We as a communist force believe in supremacy of the proletariat, but in the changed context even doctors are like workers. We need to define the proletariat in a new way and therefore we need a new ideology to guide the party,” he said.

Sapkota said both the ideologies — PMPD and people’s democracy of the 21st century — had lost their relevance after the new republican order.

“These two ideologies had their relevance till we achieved capitalist democracy, a phase we have already crossed. Now we have to devise our strategies to achieve the goals of socialism,” Sapkota added.

He said Oli and Dahal had agreed in the party document that they would go for people’s democracy, yet they were talking of the same old ideologies just to win the sympathy of party cadres.

 A version of this article appears in e-paper on July 22, 2020, of The Himalayan Times.