A meeting of party office-bearers held at the residence of party Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal at Lazimpat on Friday decided to ask Dr Sharma to tender her resignation from the post as she has courted controversy ever since she assumed the post in January, 2012. “We have decided to suggest to her that it would be good for her to resign from the post in view of various controversies,” said senior UCPN (Maoist) leader and former foreign minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha.[break]
Sharma was appointed envoy at the recommendation of then prime minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai when Shrestha himself was foreign minister. “Chairman Dahal has suggested to her over the telephone to step down. She has said that she will abide by the party´s decision,” said Dahal´s personal aide Chudamani Khadka, adding, "She will resign soon."
"But neither has the party asked me to return home nor has comrade chairman asked me to step down to date," she told Republica by telephone from Doha, Friday evening. "I will have been an ambassador once whether I stay here for one day or for four years."
The Maoist party´s move comes in the wake of Ambassador of Qatar to Nepal Ahmad Jasim Mohammed Ali Al Hamar requesting Minister for Foreign Affairs Madhav Prasad Ghimire in writing last week to recall Dr Sharma to safeguard the friendly relations subsisting between the two countries.
The Qatari envoy, during his recent meetings with senior officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), cautioned that the continuation of Dr Sharma as envoy in Qatar would not help strengthen bilateral relations. A written request to MoFA for her recall, which was made some four months ago, had gone unheeded.
The government appointed Dr Sharma as envoy to Qatar for four years. She became controversial right from the time she assumed the post largely due to her blunt remarks and lack of diplomatic decorum. She was first dragged into controversy due to her decision to close a hostel at the embassy premises for distressed Nepalese nationals, and later again due to her controversial remark in a television interview that Qatar was an ´open jail´ for Nepalese nationals.
Controversy relating to her reached its height after she allegedly wrote to the Qatari authorites to deport a Nepali national who had written something critical about her a few months ago. The Doha-based liaison committee of the UCPN (Maoist), which recommended her name as envoy to Qatar, had also earlier asked the party leadership to recall her, alleging that she had largely ignored distressed Nepalese nationals in the Gulf nation.
A reminder to govt, political parties
Foreign affairs experts and former diplomats have said that this particular incident should serve a lesson to the government that political parties need to give due consideration to the competence of candidates nominated as ambassadors under the political quota.
Former Nepalese envoy to the United Nations in New York, Prof Dr Jayaraj Acharya, said the incident was ´unfortunate´. "Politicians must uphold political decency and look for properly qualified people, not just party loyalists," he said.
Acharya also said that this particular incident should serve as a lesson to both political parties and the government to appoint persons with necessary expertise and competence as ambassadors. "What political parties and their leaders should bear in mind before recommending names for ambassadorial positions is that an ambassador represents the country, not just a political party or a certain group," Acharya further said.
Of late, Nepal has upheld the practice of appointing 50 percent of ambassadors from among career diplomats and the remaining 50 percent under the political quota. But as political parties do not seem to have given due heed to the competence and expertise required of ambassadorial nominees, Nepalese envoys appointed under the political quota have time and again courted controversy.
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