Bhattarai says the to-be-formed party's major focus will be to work for rapid economic growth
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LALITPUR, Jan 20: Former Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai has said his to-be-formed organization will be a leftist democratic party but that he will refrain from naming it as communist.
Bhattarai said a nucleus body of the new party will be announced within the next few days and that group will lay the ground for election of new leadership from a general convention.
"Our new party will be leftist democratic in its character but we will not give any name like communist and Maoist for the new organization," he told a group of journalists invited at his residence in Sanepa, Lalitpur on Wednesday.
Bhattarai, who is believed to be the main ideologue of the Maoist insurgency, said that he campaigned for establishing a new organization as the UCPN (Maoist) party organization wasn't fit for leading a new movement of economic prosperity that has become the major need of the hour in Nepal.
"The Maoist party was organized and oriented for a struggle for political cause and that can't work for economic revolution," he said.
Bhattarai said the to-be-formed party's major focus will be to work for rapid economic growth in the country.
"Neither the traditional liberalism nor the conventional state-driven socialism is suitable in the present context," he said. "So, we will adopt participatory democracy and inclusive economic development."
Stating that all the existing major parties were found and evolved mainly through the course of political struggle, he argued that a new force should right since its foundation be developed as an organization suitable to lead economic revolution.
He also rubbished the claims that his quitting of the UCPN (Maoist) party and his position as lawmaker was under a grand design of external forces.
"It was two years ago that I had announced to quit the Maoist party immediately after promulgation of new constitution from Constituent Assembly," he said. "For the last few years, I had been regularly airing my views about the need of a new force."
