Bhattarai rebuffs Dahal’s effort to mend fences

UCPN (Maoist) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal on Wednesday reached out to the party’s senior leader Baburam Bhattarai to convince him into joining the party’s Central Committee meeting scheduled to begin on Thursday.

But the fence-mending effort from Dahal by offering more CC seats to Bhattarai faction was not well received. Bhattarai told Dahal that he and his supporters will not join the CC until their demands are addressed.

Bhattarai’s demands include adopting democratic culture in the party, Dahal’s commitment to peace and constitution and respectable share in the party’s organisational set up.

Leaders close to Dahal, however, said that Bhattarai’s demands related to organisational set up are just a pretext to split the party.  They said that Bhattarai was deviating from the communist ideals and preparing to form a socialist democratic party, abandoning the ideologies of Marx and Lenin.

“Baburamji should seriously rethink his position,” said Hemanta Prakash Oli, a leader close to Dahal.

Another leader Agni Prasad Sapkota also accused Bhattarai of straying from the core communist movement at a time when the party is working to form a communist centre.

 Earlier, Dahal also held talks with Top Bahadur Rayamajhi and Devendra Poudel from the Bhattarai camp about the widening intra-party rift.  Factional feud within the party has worsened after its recent national convention.

Source : eKantipur.com