NC kicks off election publicity campaign

Kathmandu, November 8

The Nepali Congress today formally kicked-off its election publicity campaign, setting up a 43-member Central Election Publicity Coordination Sub-Committee.

The sub-committee has Gagan Kumar Thapa as its coordinator, Badri Pandey as joint-coordinator and Badri Sigdel as deputy coordinator.

The sub-committee will work under the party’s 75-member Election Mobilisation Committee formed yesterday. The committee is headed by Bal Krishna Khand, while Surendra Raj Pandey has been named joint-coordinator.

The sub-committee will take care of all regular day-to-day publicity-related activities for the parliamentary and provincial elections slated for November 26 and December 7, and work closely with the media and other stakeholders to disseminate the party’s views and agendas at the local-level through media centres to be set up in each province.

In Province-1, the media centre will be set up in Itahari, while Province-2 will get two such centres, one in Birgunj and the other in Janakpur. Poll publicity in Province-3 will be overseen by the central sub-committee.

The party will open the media centre in Pokhara in Province 4, while Butwal and Nepalgunj will have one media centre each  in Province-5. In Province-6 and Province-7, such centres will be opened at Surkhet and Dhangadi, respectively.

The media centres will disseminate publicity-related materials prepared by the mobilisation committee and publicity coordination sub-committee at the local level. The media centres will also send local reports to the headquarters, while communicating the speeches delivered by party leaders in other areas to the locals.

As part of the election campaign, the party plans to mobilise its top leaders in all the provinces where they will address large rallies. Other central leaders and influential speakers will be mobilised at the district-level.

As per the plan, Prime Minister and NC President Sher Bahadur Deuba today addressed a rally in Janakpur. He is scheduled to address rallies in Panchthar, Taplejung and Solukhumu on Saturday, before heading to Karnali and the far-west.

The party will kick-off its campaign for the second phase of elections slated for December 7 from Jhapa, where PM Deuba will address a mega rally.

Unlike in the past when only the candidates were involved in door-to-door campaigning, the party this time plans to mobilise all party cadres, for such campaigns. “During their door-to-door campaign, our workers will communicate the party’s views and agendas to the locals, while describing how the left alliance is misleading them,” said Khand.

According to Khand, the NC has taken this election as a referendum, in which the people will have to choose one from among multi-party democratic governance system and single-party communist system ‘that seeks to convert the country into a laboratory’.