A 72-year-old politician who once faced the death penalty on charges of bombing the parliament and the former royal palace is likely to become Nepal’s first president, party officials said yesterday.
Members of Nepal’s Constituent Assembly are scheduled to elect the first president of the new republic today, a key step in forming the new government because the president will swear in the new prime minister.
Independent politician Ramraja Singh was nominated for the post by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), known as the Maoists and made up of former communist rebels.
The party is the largest party, with 220 members in the 601-seat assembly.
ANTI-MONARCHY ACTIVIST
Singh was an anti-monarchy activist when he was convicted of bombing the palace and parliament building in Katmandu in 1985.
Several people were injured and Singh acknowledged his role in the bombings.
Authorities gave him a death sentence, but he was not in custody when the sentence was announced and he fled the country to live in exile in India.
He returned after 1990 when he was pardoned by a new government after the country was transformed into a constitutional monarchy.
He has not been an active politician since then.
The Maoists emerged with the most seats in the assembly after elections in April for the Constituent Assembly, which abolished the country’s centuries-old monarchy in May.
But the assembly has been unable to form a new government because the main parties have bickered over how to form a ruling coalition.
HELP NEEDED
The Maoists must recruit coalition partners because they do not have an outright majority needed to rule.
Their candidate for president, Singh, is backed by three smaller parties representing the Madheshi, a minority ethnic group in southern Nepal, where they have been campaigning for autonomy and greater rights.
Singh, who is not a member of the Maoists’ party, is a Madheshi from the south.
“We have decided to support Ramraja Singh because he is a Madheshi candidate and we have always been saying we will vote for someone who represents our cause,” said Jayaprakash Gupta of the Madheshi People’s Rights Forum.
MAJORITY VOICE
The four parties supporting Singh have more than half the total number of seats required for him to be elected president.
The Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), the second and third largest parties, have their own candidates for president.
They do not, however, have enough votes.
‘CHILD PORNOGRAPHY’: The doll on Shein’s Web site measure about 80cm in height, and it was holding a teddy bear in a photo published by a daily newspaper France’s anti-fraud unit on Saturday said it had reported Asian e-commerce giant Shein (希音) for selling what it described as “sex dolls with a childlike appearance.” The French Directorate General for Competition, Consumer Affairs and Fraud Control (DGCCRF) said in a statement that the “description and categorization” of the items on Shein’s Web site “make it difficult to doubt the child pornography nature of the content.” Shortly after the statement, Shein announced that the dolls in question had been withdrawn from its platform and that it had launched an internal inquiry. On its Web site, Le Parisien daily published a
China’s Shenzhou-20 crewed spacecraft has delayed its return mission to Earth after the vessel was possibly hit by tiny bits of space debris, the country’s human spaceflight agency said yesterday, an unusual situation that could disrupt the operation of the country’s space station Tiangong. An impact analysis and risk assessment are underway, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) said in a statement, without providing a new schedule for the return mission, which was originally set to land in northern China yesterday. The delay highlights the danger to space travel posed by increasing amounts of debris, such as discarded launch vehicles or vessel
RUBBER STAMP? The latest legislative session was the most productive in the number of bills passed, but critics attributed it to a lack of dissenting voices On their last day at work, Hong Kong’s lawmakers — the first batch chosen under Beijing’s mantra of “patriots administering Hong Kong” — posed for group pictures, celebrating a job well done after four years of opposition-free politics. However, despite their smiles, about one-third of the Legislative Council will not seek another term in next month’s election, with the self-described non-establishment figure Tik Chi-yuen (狄志遠) being among those bowing out. “It used to be that [the legislature] had the benefit of free expression... Now it is more uniform. There are multiple voices, but they are not diverse enough,” Tik said, comparing it
Prime ministers, presidents and royalty on Saturday descended on Cairo to attend the spectacle-laden inauguration of a sprawling new museum built near the pyramids to house one of the world’s richest collections of antiquities. The inauguration of the Grand Egyptian Museum, or GEM, marks the end of a two-decade construction effort hampered by the Arab Spring uprisings, the COVID-19 pandemic and wars in neighboring countries. “We’ve all dreamed of this project and whether it would really come true,” Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly told a news conference, calling the museum a “gift from Egypt to the whole world from a
RSS