The UML’s Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal faction has decided to intensify its campaign to expand parallel committees in the party. All this is being done in the name of unity. The Vietnam War-era credo ‘you have to burn the village in order to save it’, seems to have acquired particular relevance from the other end of the ideological spectrum here.
An informal two-day meeting of lawmakers and central committee members of the UML’s Nepal-Khanal faction decided to implement the 17-point resolution adopted earlier by a meeting of national cadres.
Accordingly, the faction will continue its struggle inside the party by forming parallel committees to reorganize the party, strive for unification among communist forces, and not surrender to the incumbent leadership.
After the Supreme Court ordered the revival of UML and the Maoist Center, the Nepal-Khanal faction has been lobbying to legitimize party committees that existed on May 16, 2018, before the two parties merged to form the doubly dolorous Nepal Communist Party (NCP).
UML chairman Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, on the other hand, has consolidated power. The party’s central committee endorsed the parliamentary party statute to give him, as the PP leader, sweeping authority to recall any lawmaker elected to the House of Representatives under the proportional representation system and choose the deputy parliamentary party leader, a position Subas Nembang currently occupies.
The central committee meeting also decided to hold the party’s 10th national convention from November 18 to 22 and annulled all office-bearers’ positions except those of the chairman and the general secretary.
The duo is entrusted with selecting the new office bearers and the standing committee – in a thinly veiled attempt to emaciate the Nepal-Khanal faction. The party central committee decided to ask Nepal and three other parliamentarians to clarify their activities. Oli also inducted 23 Maoist leaders into the UML central committee, giving the prime minister a clear majority.
The Nepal-Khanal faction continues to demand that Oli revoke his decisions, which the party chair has rebuffed with equal vigor. The prime minister also said that the clarifications submitted by Madhav Nepal and Bhim Rawal were unacceptable and suggested the party could initiate further action against them.
Oli surrogates like Surya Thapa, the prime minister’s press adviser, have suggested that Nepal and Rawal be suspended from the party central committee for six months as part of a cleansing campaign.
With the party hanging perilously between unity and split, a countervailing dynamic is at play. Despite taking an increasingly harder line since the Supreme Court’s restoration of the House of Representative and the NCP’s nullification, he is reluctant to hound out his rivals at the cost of being responsible for a formal split. The Nepal-Khanal don’t want to be blamed for any split, either. So the UML essentially finds itself in a position it has been in for much of its existence.
With the Nepali Congress, Maoist Centre and Janata Samajwadi Party no less flustered on the eve of Nepali new year, however, perhaps our astrologers can serve up more exciting insights into what the stars might have in store for us. It’s not as if Nepalis, who hardly hold elected officials accountable, would serve summons to deficient stargazers.
