On Mar 13, Nepal decided to ban the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-Maoist-Chand) also known as “Netra Bikram Chand Group” or simply as “Biplav Group”. The decision was taken after four security agencies gave a briefing to the cabinet of Prime Minister Sharma Oli that Chand party’s activities were more criminal than political.
A High Level Political Talks team formed under lawmaker Som Prasad Pandey to hold a dialogue with Chand also reached more or less the same conclusion. The team could not talk with Chand directly but managed to speak with some central committee members.
“The Chand party is an extremist political outfit and the government needs to take action against its illegal activities,” they said in their report two days after last Christmas. The report however asked the government to try to engage with Chand in a dialogue, since his party is a political outfit.
CPN-Maoist-Chand has been engaged in violence since its inception in Dec 2014. During the first phase of 2017 elections, its cadres targeted candidates and the election campaign across 32 Hill Districts in six Provinces in their bid to foil the poll.
“Our party comrades should resort to small and medium scale physical action in a responsible fashion but avoid causing human casualties,” a secret circular of CPN-Maoist-Chand obtained by Republica revealed.
The Chand group even formed a parallel People’s Government and People’s Court by the time of the second phase of elections and stepped up its violence. It carried out six bomb explosions in the first phase (17 persons were injured) and five bomb blasts in the second phase (one killed and 26 injured) in the second phase.
The outfit also engineered clashes between rival political parties to scuttle the ballot – six clashes (15 injured) in the first phase, and three clashes (six injured) in the second phase.
These acts of violence and sabotage prompted the Ministry of Home Affairs (MoHA) to view the Chand party as a major security threat to the polls, and direct the Police to arrest top Chand leaders of the CPN-Maoist-Chand.
The US State Department also attributed the spurt “in incidents of terrorism against domestic targets, largely surrounding elections held in late 2017” to the Chand group. Its 2017 Country Report on Terrorism noted that Nepal’s security organs largely directed their counter-terrorism efforts against the Biplav Group, “forming special teams to identify and arrest its leaders”.
While the demand to ban the Chand Group is not new, what forced the government to act were the 8 March IED blast in Kathmandu (at the residence of the Chairman of the Nepal Association of Foreign Employment Agencies) and the 13 March explosion in Chitwan District (outside the office of Bharatpur Metropolis-5, Torikhet).
The two persons were injured in the first blast and none in the second one.
A month ago, on 22 February, a pressure cooker bomb was found inside a Kathmandu restaurant and it was defused in time by the army bomb disposal squad. On the same day, at least three persons were injured in an explosion in Lalitpur District (at the entrance to the office of a telecom service provider). A Chand leader claimed that the blast was to teach a lesson to the mobile company for its failure to “clear its tax liabilities.”
These blasts underscored the fact that the Chand outfit is a new emerging threat that cannot be ignored any longer.
The Second Nepal Investment Summit scheduled towards March end.
The Sharma Oli government cannot allow the perception of deteriorating security situation just when it is soliciting foreign capital for infrastructure development of the land locked country.
– m rama rao