KATHMANDU, May 3: Dal Bahadur Rana, a lawmaker of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP), has refuted the rumors that the party has decided to field its Vice-chairman Bamdev Gautam from Papa-1 for the House of Representatives. 

Posting a note on his Facebook a few hours after the party’s secretariat meeting on Saturday evening, lawmaker Rana said that the rumors about ‘his resignation from the HoR and fielding Gautam from Palpa-1 so as to make him the prime minister are misleading and go against the party’s unification process. “The issue was neither raised during the meeting nor was it discussed with me,” Rana has said in the note. 

He, however, expressed his happiness over the decision made by the secretariat meeting to elect the party's vice-chairman Bamdev Gautam to the House of Representatives “at an appropriate time”.

Immediately after the NCP Secretariat meeting on Saturday, some media outlets reported that the party’s General Secretary Bishnu Poudel had convinced Rana to step down from his legislative role, clearing ground for Vice-chairman Gautam to run from Palpa-1. 

Earlier at the secretariat meeting of April 29, NCP chairman and PM KP Sharma Oli offered to make the party's senior leader Bam Dev Gautam the new prime minister and Madhav Kumar Nepal the third chairman of the party in order to settle the intra-party disputes. 

Gautam, however, had lost the parliamentary contest in 2017 to Nepali Congress candidate Sanjaya Gautam in Bardiya-1. Sanjaya had defeated heavyweight Gautam by a slim margin of 727 votes.

 
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