http://www.nepalnews.com/archive/2009/may/may11/news06.php
Even as he resigned from his post saying he will never tolerate interference of "foreign lords" on country's internal matters, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has revealed to an Indian newspaper that he requested New Delhi to send a top diplomat to help forge a consensus on the increasingly tense standoff over the his government's plans to dismiss the Army chief.
In an interview to The Hindu at his official Baluwatar residence on Sunday, PM Dahal said he asked Indian Ambassador Rakesh Sood to request New Delhi to send Foreign Secretary Shiv Shankar Menon "or some other senior official" for talks as his government moved towards dismissing Army chief Rookmangud Katawal in the beginning of may.
"We knew some confusion is there between the Maoist-led government and India on this question," PM Dahal, who is also the chairman of Unified CPN (Maoist), told the paper talking about the "urgent message" he sent to India seeking the presence of a high-level envoy to help forge a political consensus over the issue.
This in a situation, as according to the paper, when parties like the CPN-UML "were changing their stand and siding with the general with quiet encouragement from India."
"I wanted to settle this issue through interaction and discussion with high-level officials from Delhi. But unfortunately, the ambassador informed me that this cannot happen now because the election campaign is going on, that nobody is there, that it is very difficult."
Expressing his angst over the Maoist-led government's failure to affirm"military supremacy over the military" by dismissing Katawal, he also said he believed the long election season in India meant the country's security and bureaucratic establishment "were now calling the shots on Nepal policy" and that a "mechanical and subjective analysis" of the situation "especially on the question of Nepal's so-called tilt to China" had colored South Block's perception of the civil-military issue.
PM Dahal, however, acknowledged that several Chinese officials had visited Nepal in recent months but said "not a single delegation" had come on his invitation.
"The initiative for these visits came solely from the Chinese side, mainly because of the Tibet crisis," he said.
Dahal also said his government had no intention of concluding a new friendship treaty with China without discussions among all Nepali political parties as well as with New Delhi. nepalnews.com ag May 11 09
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