Kathmandu, Mar 4 The government of Nepal led by Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli is set to introduce five ordinances at the House of Representatives, the lower house on Wednesday. The ruling coalition has issued directives to its Members of Parliament (MPs), asking them to attend the session and remain present until ordinances are voted on.
The Oli government holds a majority in the lower house, with 88 MPs from Congress and 78 from Unified Marxist Leninist (UML) in the 275-member House of Representatives. The government is expecting the ordinances to get passed easily in the lower house.
The government decided to go ahead with the five ordinances, excluding the controversial land ordinance, which has caused considerable debate within the ruling coalition itself. This decision followed a meeting in February where leaders of the ruling coalition agreed to move ahead with the five ordinances that had minimal opposition in the House of Representatives, reported Nepal's leading daily Kathmandu Post.
The ruling coalition lacks the numbers in the upper house, the National Assembly. The Congress has 16 seats, and the UML has 10 seats in the 59-member upper house. The support of the Janata Samajbadi Party-Nepal (JSP-Nepal), which has three seats in the National Assembly, has become crucial for the ruling coalition to pass the ordinances from the upper house. The JSP stated that the land-related ordinance, a sixth ordinance, must be scrapped before it agrees to support the government on the other five ordinances.
The Upendra Yadav-led JSP-Nepal had voted for the KP Sharma Oli government during the floor test in July last year. Though not in the government, the party supports the ruling alliance. Another Madhesh-based outfit, the Loktantrik Samajbadi Party (LSP), is already in the Oli-headed Cabinet. Despite agreeing on five ordinances, JSP-Nepal and LSP have declared that they would not accept the land-related ordinance.
PM Oli and his coalition partners claimed that these ordinances are urgent and necessary. But the opposition parties in Nepal have raised concerns and criticised the government for bypassing the regular legislative process. The ordinances must be approved by both houses of Parliament in Nepal within 60 days of being introduced, but their fate in the National Assembly remains uncertain, reported Kathmandu Post.
--IANS
Disclaimer: This post has been auto-published from an agency feed without any modifications to the text and has not been reviewed by an editor