Kathmandu, Nepal, July 24, 2019: Squabbling over who should lead the party’s key departments, particularly the school department has created a limbo to declare the head of the departments of the ruling head Nepal Communist Party (NCP).
Though the NCP chairmen duo KP Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal have made a plan to name the five key leaders to head the major departments of the party on Tuesday, squabbling among the rival leaders, particularly over the issue of school department, would avert the plan.
Party's secretariat meeting is called for Tuesday with the plan to name the five key leaders to head the major departments of the party. Bilateral and trilateral meeting are also intensified with the aim to reach on consensus over the names of the head of key departments.
Though the newly unified NCP holds different 32 departments, some influential leaders had intensely been lobbying to get the coveted posts of major departments like organization, finance, foreign affairs, policy and research including school department.
Rounds of meetings held between Oli and Dahal held on Monday evening have concluded to table the name the heads of key departments at the Secretariat meeting on Tuesday but not finalized the names, a standing committee member of the party said preferring anonymity.
It is said that Oli wants to pick Ishwar Pokharel as school department chief. However, Dahal has been lobbying for Narayan Kaji Shrestha for the post. Interesting fact is here that some influential leaders even from the former CPN UML are lobbying against of Pokhrel.
The same fate is also replicated even in the organization department. Oli wants to pick either Ram Bahadur Thapa or Bishnu Poudel in the post while Dahal wants to pick Bam Dev Gautam in the post.
As the organization department plays an important role for deciding the party's membership, assigning roles to the cadres and their promotion too, both the chairs want to pick their nearer and dearer in the coveted post to make stronger to their respective camp.
However, there is no huge differences to name Madhav Kumar Nepal as the head of the party's international affairs department and Jhala Nath Khanal as the chief of the policy and research department.
As the ruling head NCP was born out of the merger between the two communist forces with different schools of thought, the leaders have been squabbling not only over the leadership issue but also for the ideology and others.
