The task force formed to prepare the proposal for organizational unification of the ruling CPN is mired in disputes.
Coordinator Ram Bahadur Thapa during the meeting of task force on Thursday recommended to send the report including the works done through the secretariat meeting, and party general secretary and member of the task force Bishnu Paudel seconded that but the majority of task force members rejected the proposal.
The members threatened that they will prepare a separate report and present it in the standing committee meeting.
Speaking immediately after Thapa made the proposal along with a three-page draft document, Barsha Man Pun rejected the proposal. "Efforts are being made to send a message that the task force has failed," Pun said. "We can present the issues that have been agreed upon and those that have not been in the report. But efforts are on to depict us as failure."
Speaking after Pun, Surendra Pandey and Yogesh Bhattarai also threatened to submit a separate report. Beduram Bhusal and Lekh Raj Bhatta also supported the threat to present a separate report. Other members in the task force Shankar Pokharel and Raghubir Mahaseth were not present during the meeting and Paudel was the only one to support Thapa.
"The task force was formed by the standing committee and the secretariat cannot dissolve it. They are trying to tag it as a failure without even holding discussions," a task force member told Setopati.
The previous task force meeting on January 21 had agreed on the issue of amending the party statute. But there was dispute about whether the task force can recommend about changing the members in provincial committees. Coordinator Thapa had stopped the meeting after that.
Members from the Madhav Nepal faction during the meeting were firm that the party should move forward as per the principle of one person, one post, and recommended that the provincial committees should be changed accordingly.
They argued that Chief Minister of Province 5 Shankar Pokharel should resign from the post of province coordinator. But Pokharel has already told the standing committee that he would rather resign from CM than relinquish the political responsibility.
The meeting could not take a decision once the issue of organizational changes was discussed. The Nepal faction has accused Pokharel of recommending only the leaders from his faction in the district committees when he was in the unification task force before he was appointed the province coordinator. The issue again entered the task force.
"We can submit the report in a couple of days. But the task force meeting was not convened. It was called for today after January 21," a member in the task force said.
Coordinator Thapa is in minority in the nine-member task force after a majority of five members warned of submitting a separate report. "We have said that we will not sign on the report that states that the task force could not work," the task force member added. "The meeting has been postponed till Friday after we threatened to submit a separate report."
The standing committee had formed the task force under Thapa on December 28, 2018 to submit a proposal about organizational unification of the party and to resolve the discrepancies in the provincial committees within 15 days.
The task force has failed to even enter the issue of district committees after failing to agree on the issue of provincial committees.
