Kathmandu, December 13

The Nepali Congress plans to convene its central working committee meeting within a week to introspect the crushing defeat it faced in the recently-held parliamentary and provincial elections. The CWC meet is also expected to discuss prospects of the party adopting cadre-based model from the current mass-based model.

The NC, which had emerged as the single largest party in the second Constituent Assembly elections in 2013, has now won just 23 out of 165 parliamentary first-past-the-post seats. In the provincial FPTP elections, the party won just 41 out of 330 seats.

The left alliance of the CPN-UML and the CPN-Maoist Centre swept both the parliamentary and provincial FPTP elections, winning a combined 116 parliamentary seats (UML’s 80 and CPN-MC’s 36) and 241 provincial seats (UML’s 167 and CPN-MC’s 74).

An additional 110 members are also elected through proportional representation electoral system to the federal parliament, and 220 members to provincial assemblies.

The major issues on the CWC meet agenda include introspecting loss in the election, current national politics, giving shape to party departments, setting up the party’s provincial structures, and charting the way ahead, according to NC leader Bal Krishna Khand, who coordinated the party’s central election mobilisation committee for the polls held on November 26 and December 7.

“We will hold the CWC meet within a week, where we will discuss these issues very seriously and come up with a conclusion on what role the party should now play in the broader national interest,” he said. “Also, each CWC member will be assigned specific tasks to ensure revival of the party.”

The CWC meet will also discuss the party’s prospects of adopting cadre-based model from the current mass-based model to rejuvenate the party, according to Khand.

“Talks among leaders have already begun on making the NC a cadre-based party. We are more or less in agreement on first making our sister organisations, including the Tarun Dal, cadre-based,” he said, adding that the CC meet will also evaluate the performance of all the party’s sister organisations.

The party’s youth leader Bishwa Prakash Sharma too said the issue of cadre-based or mass-based model would be raised in the CWC meet. He, however, said just switching from mass-based to cadre-based model without other reforms was not going to solve the problem. “The CWC meet will discuss all these issues seriously before reaching a conclusion,” he said.