Nepali Congress (NC) central member Shankar Bhandari has submitted signatures of over 1,000 Mahasamiti members demanding a Hindu state to party president Sher Bahadur Deuba.
Bhandari said that he submitted signatures of 1,063 Mahasamiti members to Deuba during the closed session of the ongoing NC Mahasamiti meeting at Godavari of Lalitpur on Thursday.
He said that secularism should be scrapped and Nepal should be declared a Hindu state while respecting all religions.
A signature campaign demanding declaration of Nepal as a Hindu state had been carried out during the NC Mahasamiti meeting five years ago too, with 717 Mahasamiti members signing on the proposal. But the party had not entertained the proposal. NC has nearly 2,300 Mahasamiti members.
Though the Mahasamiti members submitted their signatures demanding a Hindu state, NC had already said that it would not be incorporated in the meeting’s agenda for discussion.
During the NC central committee meeting held on February 15-16 at Sanepa, 22 central members had presented a supplementary proposal for a Hindu state. The central members included Shankar Bhandari, Devendra Raj Kandel, Prakash Rasaili Snehi, Rangamati Shahi, Bidya Timilsina, Gehendra Giri, Sita Devkota, Arjun Jung Bahadur Singh, Shukra Raj Sharma, Pushpa Bhusal, Sharada Paudel, Nagina Yadav, Nripa Bahadur Bada, Sanjay Gautam, Bhim Parajuli, Dinesh Koirala, Mukta Kumari Yadav and Dila Sangraula.
Organizing a press conference at Godavari on Sunday before the Mahasamiti meeting, chief of NC publicity department Min Bahadur Bishwakarma had said that a single-religion state was not acceptable to NC. He had said that NC was not an ethnic, regional, religious or communal party.
The Mahasamiti meeting, which began on Monday, is scheduled to end on Thursday.
Group discussions were held on proposals presented by NC Vice-president Purna Bahadur Khadka, General Secretaries Gagan Thapa and Bishwa Prakash Sharma, Spokesperson Prakash Sharan Mahat and others during the meeting. NC province presidents are discussing the proposals on Thursday.
