Former PM Bhattarai against the idea of 'Republic Nepal'

Tuesday September 11, 03:13 AM
http://in.news.yahoo.com/070910/48/6kl30.html

Former Prime Minister K P Bhattarai on Sunday came out strongly in favour of reconciliation between the 'constitutional monarchy' and the Nepali Congress party even though Prime Minister G P Koirala has asked his party's manifesto committee to go republic.

In a signed statement, the only surviving founder member of the Nepali Congress some sixty years ago said, "a prolonged difference between the king and the democratic forces will only weaken the nepali nationalism, independence and democracy".

Bhattarai's statement in support of a constitutional monarchy comes at a time when Prime Minister G P Koirala's daughter Sujata Koirala, a member of the party's central committee, has stood up against her father stating that the policy of national reconciliation, initiated by party's founder leader and ideologue B P Koirala, for a reconciliation between the king and the democratic forces was in the best interest of the country. Bhattarai's statement came as a morale booster for those who are opposing Nepali Congress shedding its line for a republic Nepal.

Bhattarai recalled that party's founder members B P Koirala and Ganeshman Singh had returned to Nepal in 1976 from India ending their eight-year long exile with the call for national reconciliation. That policy, Bhattarai said, is valid today as it was before and "will remain so for quite some time to come".

He also had some words of caution to the king. "Now it is high time to remember once again that the monarchy truly acted as a unifying symbol of diverse religions, culture, ethnic and political groupings within a democratic set-up", and Nepal's transition needs a safelanding "which is possible only through unity and reconciliation'.

"Politics of hatred and denial dictated by undemocratic desire of revenge will only sow the seeds of disintegration of the country, and it is our responsibility to defeat those designs together. Let us be guided by our lessons of the past and collective thoughts for future, and not by antying else including republicanism", Bhattarai, a Gandhian, said.