Congress Skirts Procedure to Select National Assembly Candidates: Thapa

Kathmandu — Nepali Congress General Secretary Gagan Kumar Thapa has expressed disagreement with the process used to select candidates for the National Assembly election.

He raised objections to both the idea of forming an alliance with other parties and the candidate-selection process itself. Speaking to journalists after a meeting of the Central Executive Committee Wednesday morning, Thapa accused the Congress of completely bypassing proper procedures and party rules in choosing its candidates.

According to him, by forming an alliance with the UML, Congress prioritized certain individuals — pulling them out of their own “pockets” to make them candidates. “The way coordination has been worked out is that within both Nepali Congress and UML, their own people — those who should be made candidates — have been divided into clusters and allocated accordingly. UML also gets to choose its own people, which community they should be from — it’s literally been divided into clusters,” he said. “For Congress it’s no longer about the party, it’s about picking people from a leader’s own pocket — that’s how they’ve clustered it.”

Thapa noted that, as a result, not a single candidate was chosen from the Janajati and Muslim clusters within Congress. He said this shows that the party violated its procedures and bylaws, and that he and fellow General Secretary Bishwprakash Sharma both disagree with this.

He also said that within Congress, he and others have been marginalized. “Lately, in the process of bypassing procedures and bylaws in Nepali Congress, especially while I and General Secretary Bishwprakash Sharma have been carrying out our roles in the party, there has been a concerted effort to encircle and sideline us,” he said.