BUTWAL, Feb 18: A leader of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) Wednesday tabled a ´supplementary proposal´ at the ongoing closed-door session of the party´s national convention, asking the party not to go for a federal setup. [break]
Soon after Dr Pushpa Raj Kandel tabled the controversial proposal at around 3 p.m., pro-federalism UML delegates – mostly janajatis and Madhesis – booed him inside the hall, according to one delegate. Kandel was given only 15 minutes to present his 43-page proposal.
Janajatis and Madhesis are ardent proponents of federalism and Nepal´s interim constitution also says the country will be restructured along federal lines.Later, Kandel told myrepublica.com that federalism has come to Nepal through force. "It didn´t come through the people´s vote… It is a shift from one extremism to another. It is neo-feudalism," said Kandel, adding that federalism was brought to Nepal out of "negative" thinking. "The negative thinking will neither build Nepal nor ensure economic growth."
The proposal argues that the nation will disintegrate if it embraces federalism. Dr Kandel, who is an associate professor at Saraswati Multiple Campus in Kathmandu, has argued in the proposal that Nepal should continue with a "centralized" state structure. "State resources should first be centralized, and then they can be redistributed," he told myrepublica.com.
Kandel, who used to be chairman of the party´s audit department and ex-officio member of the recently dissolved central committee, complained that "disturbances" were created from the floor when he was presenting his paper. "I couldn´t present it in the way I thought I was going to. I couldn´t do it while remaining free of tension," he said. "They made noise."
Three other "supplementary" papers – one on intra-party democratization (by 18 party leaders including Pradip Gyawali and Shankar Pokharel), another on analysis of the Nepali class struggle (by 55 young leaders including Yogesh Bhattarai and Ghanashyam Bhusal) and the third (by leader Guru Baral) arguing that outgoing general secretary Jhala Nath Khanal´s political paper presented at the convention didn´t do justice to the UML´s guiding principle of People´s Multiparty Democracy as propounded by the late UML leader Madan Bhandari – were tabled at the closed-door session earlier in the day.
Left-leaning Rastriya Janamorcha, which has only four members in the 601-member Constituent Assembly, has led an anti-federalism crusade.
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