Kathmandu. The ruling Maoist center is going to start a three-month campaign tomorrow, Saturday. Top leaders will also go to the ward level during the ‘Maoist with Janata: Special Transformation Campaign, which will start simultaneously in 7,243 wards across the country.
According to the Head of Publicity Department, Agni Prasad Sapkota, party president Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda will inaugurate the campaign through virtual means tomorrow at 9 a.m. After that, he will go to the program of Chandragiri Municipality Ward No. 2 Ghattedanda. The wards to which all other officials will go have been designated.
Sapkota says that the campaign to return to the people was announced after realizing the weakness of the party. According to him, during the campaign, the target is to meet 2.5 million voters directly and increase the number of party members to 8 million.
This is not the first time that the Maoist center has announced a campaign to return to the people. It announced a campaign to strengthen the organization by creating a production brigade. After the November 2079 general election, a two-month campaign was announced in February. But that was limited to the announcement.
Most of the 218 people who expressed their opinion in the last Central Committee meeting criticized the trend of announcing campaigns, not going to the work area for a single day, trying to run the organization by phone, and staying in the city and taking charge of the village. The meeting decided to run the ‘Maoist special transformation campaign with people’ for three months. Sapkota, the head of the campaign department who is also the vice president, says that, realizing the weakness of the party in the past, this time it has also prepared a monitoring mechanism and is going to run the campaign.
The Maoist leaders also see this campaign as an important watershed after the peace process to establish the Maoist movement as a party. “It is felt that those who fought the people’s war in a way that shook the earth yesterday are being cut off from the people,” he said.
As Sapekata said, the Maoists who came to the peace process with 12 points of agreement had unprecedented success in the first Constituent Assembly election in 2006. Directly, the Maoists won 120 out of 240 seats and were the first party with 220 seats in the 601-member Constituent Assembly. Even when the second Nepali Congress and the third party UML came together, the Maoists were the only ones around.
Since then, the size has been decreasing in one election after another. Currently, the Maoists have a total of 32 seats in the 275-member House of Representatives. Despite winning a few seats by direct alliance, the National Independent Party, which was formed at the time of the election, got only about half of the votes. The situation is the same in the provinces.
The condition of the organization also remained the same. At one time, the Maoists had a central committee of nearly 4,000, but now there are more than 700 central committees. In addition to leading the government at the center, the organization of the Maoists has not been seen to be functioning, even though there are some leaders and some power partners in the provinces.
Not only the workers at the lower level but also those in the public leadership express their dissatisfaction. Maoist Chairman Prachanda himself expresses his displeasure about the size, type, and tendency of the party. The last time he made a similar speech was in the opening session of the Central Committee meeting, which was held from July 17 to 21. “The party is feeling cut off from the people; it is true that we leaders are corrupt somewhere”, he said. “If we do not correct ourselves now, there is no alternative to dissolution.”