Nepal PM KP Oli holds all-party meet to decide on MCC, elections, Covid-19

The Millennium Challenge Corporation Nepal compact will be included in the agenda of the Parliament Business Advisory Committee after April 19. The fate of it will be decided by Parliament, it has been decided.

Updated on: Apr 17, 2021, 20:19:11 IST

By Shishir Gupta

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Nepal Prime Minister convened an all-party meeting in Baluwater on Saturday which took crucial decisions regarding Millennium Challenge Corporation, elections and Covid-19 management. It has been decided that the Millennium Challenge Corporation Nepal compact will be included in the agenda of the Parliament Business Advisory Committee after April 19. The fate of it will be decided by Parliament.

Nepal Prime Minister KP Oli blamed Speaker Agni Sapkota for not allowing Parliament and the government to function. (Reuters)

The meeting was attended by UML (Unified Marxist-Leninist) leaders Subash Chandra Nemwang, Ishwar Pokhrel, Bishnu Paudel. From Nepali Congress, president Sher Bahadur Deuba, Ram Chandra Poudel, Bimalendra Nidhi and Bal Krishna Khand were present. From JSPN (Janata Samajbadi Party -- Nepal), president Mahanta Thakur and Laxman Lal Karna along with Sarbendranath Shukla participated in Saturday's meeting. Rajendra Mahato was not present as he is at Janakpur.

Interestingly, Baburam Bhattarai and Upendra Yadav did not participate in the all-party meeting. CPN-Maoist chairman Prachanda and UML leader Nepal did not attend the meeting, saying that they were not invited.

At the meeting, Oli blamed Speaker Agni Sapkota for not allowing Parliament and the government to function.

Foreign minister Gyawali said that the MCC grant had been stopped for three years. Now, it should be allowed to be tabled in Parliament. He also said that elections will be held on some seats rendered vacant due to the termination of some MPs.

Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba said his party is ready for mid-term polls but the government should take care of the general convention, scheduled in August while announcing the date of elections.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More

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