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Nepal celebrates peaceful vote as results trickle in

Results trickled in yesterday as Nepal celebrated surprisingly peaceful elections, contested by Maoists and mainstream parties, which are set to turn the Himalayan kingdom into a republic.

The vote on Thursday was a key plank of a peace deal with the Maoists to elect an assembly that will rewrite the Constitution and is likely to abolish an unpopular Hindu monarchy.

Despite fears that polling would ignite violence, only sporadic incidents took place.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon congratulated Nepal on the vote, which he said “took place in a generally orderly and peaceful atmosphere.”

“Nepal stuns world, itself,” a banner headline in the English-language daily the Kathmandu Post read.

“The Nepali people have once more proved doomsayers wrong,” the Nepali Times said.

In spite of clashes, shootings and bombings in the weeks leading up to the polls, just 33 of 21,000 polling booths had to be shut, the Election Commission said.

Security had been tight and only isolated flare-ups, including three deaths in the ethnically tense south, were reported — no worse than on any other day.

If the count goes smoothly, the results for more than a third of the seats allocated under the constituency system were expected in just over a week, the Election Commission said.

“Results have already started trickling in. There are some areas where the ballot boxes are still coming and it may take some time due to remote geographical conditions,” spokesman Laxman Bhattarai said.

The only one of Kathmandu’s 10 constituencies to use electronic voting machines was also the first to declare. The winner was the candidate of the centrist Nepali Congress led by interim Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala.

Maoist party supremo Prachanda was leading in his constituency on the southern edge of Kathmandu, television reports said.

And in what might become a symbolic victory in another area of the city, the Maoist candidate was also ahead of the leader of the rival Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist).
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