India’s belated bid for a role in Nepal’s constitution-making process has united the landlocked nation’s top mainstream parties as never before, Nepali media reported on Sunday.
Shedding their inherent differences, Nepali Congress (NC), considered closest to New Delhi, Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) and Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M) have stood rock solid in their resistance to India’s efforts to customize their country’s new constitution to its requirements. These three parties have an overwhelming majority in the 601-member constituent assembly. New Delhi is sympathetic to the demands of Madhesis (Maithili, Bhojpuri, Avadhi, Hindi and Urdu-speaking people) for more representation and autonomy.
“Delhi seems to have lost much of its goodwill in the rest of Nepal by supporting only one section of the population. The Nepali people will take a long time to get over this,” rued a Nepali diplomat.
Prior to this, NC, founded in Kolkata in 1946, had never been in conflict with India. It had rather been party to almost all treaties and agreements with New Delhi that Communists found loaded in favour of India. On the contrary, CPN-UML and UCPN-M take to the streets against India at the drop of a hat.
