NEW DELHI — Nepal’s dominant Communist party was routed, the country’s
politics swung sharply to the right and India’s influence in Nepal is
likely to soar after the first set of results from last week’s election
was finalized on Monday.
The Nepali Congress, the country’s oldest political party and one that
favors close ties with India, won 105 of the 240 directly elected seats.
The Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) came in second
with 91 seats. Despite their party’s name, the Marxist-Leninists are
considered centrists in Nepal. The Unified Communist Party of Nepal
(Maoist), the dominant Communist party, secured only 26 seats in the
direct election, a small fraction of the total it earned in the 2008
elections.
The majority of seats in the Constituent Assembly will be determined by
proportional votes, and in those preliminary returns the Nepali Congress
is again first, followed by the Marxist-Leninists, according to the
Election Commission of Nepal. Together, the two parties are likely to
dominate the new Constituent Assembly.
Because a two-thirds majority in the Constituent Assembly is required
for a constitution to be adopted, however, the Maoists may still play a
critical though reduced role.
Since the scope of their loss became clear, the Maoists have said that the elections were riddled with fraud,
charges that have been dismissed by independent election observers
including former President Jimmy Carter. After a meeting of the group’s
leaders on Monday, a Maoist spokesman said that the party would
participate in the Constituent Assembly.
“We have put together a couple of conditions to participate in the
assembly and will join once they are met,” said Agni Sapkota, the
spokesman.
Those conditions include an investigation into election fraud and the
forging of a consensus among political parties about how the most
contentious issues facing the assembly will be resolved.
Nepal’s election commission has ruled out a revote or recount. “We are
not in a position to review the vote after all parties were provided
chances to review the entire process,” said the chief election
commissioner, Neel Kantha Uprety.
Lok Raj Baral, executive chairman of the Nepal Center for Contemporary
Studies, said the Maoists’ dismal performance shocked everyone. But he
predicted that the Maoists would participate in the Constituent
Assembly’s constitution-writing process.
“They have no other option,” Mr. Baral said.
The Maoists fought an insurgency against government troops from 1996 to
2006, joined a peace process and participated in elections in 2008 that
they dominated. Many of their fighters joined the national army. Some
Maoist leaders took sanctuary in India during the war, but India is
unlikely to be as accommodating should the war restart.
Counting of the ballots in the proportional vote, in which voters picked
a political party, and in which 122 parties are competing for 335
seats, is expected to be completed in two weeks. In another sign of the
rightward turn in Nepal’s politics, the royalist Rastriya Prajatantra
Party Nepal, a nonfactor in the previous assembly, is now in fourth
place in the preliminary returns of the party balloting.
More than 70 percent of Nepal’s eligible voters participated in the Nov.
19 vote despite an election boycott and transportation strike by a
coalition of 33 parties, including hard-line Maoists.
The new assembly is charged with writing the country’s constitution, a
task the previous assembly was unable to complete after it became
deadlocked over whether to adopt a parliamentary or presidential system
of government, and whether ethnicity or geography should be used to
divide the country into states.-nytimes.com
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