Nepali Parliament prepping up to elect a new Speaker

The Lower House of Nepal parliament will start the process to pick a new House Speaker next week. A meeting of the House of Representatives (HoR) is to be held on December 27 in Kathmandu, initiating a parliamentary process for picking a new speaker of the House. Nepal’s House Speaker position has been vacant since Krishna Bahadur Mahara resigned over a rape allegation. Thus, a meeting of the HoR has been called to initiate the process of selection of a new Speaker. 

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Deputy Speaker Shiva Maya Tumbahamphe chaired the winter session of Nepal’s lower house in the absence of House Speaker. The winter session began on Friday, December 20.

The HoR is proceeding towards the election with much caution this time around since as per their Constitution, the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker must be from different parties and sexes.

Their constitution states that "the election under Clause (1) shall be so held that there is one woman as either Speaker or Deputy Speaker, and the Speaker and the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives shall be representatives from different parties.”

The recently resigned Speaker Krishna Bahadur Mahara represented then CPN (Maoist Center) and the current Deputy Speaker Shivamaya Tumbahamphe, was from the former CPN-UML at the time of their election. The two parties merged afterwards to form the Nepal Communist Party (NCP).

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The ruling party, however, has decided not to make any change to the two posts, arguing that they were no longer part of either parties because they had resigned their party positions right after being elected Speaker and Deputy Speaker.

NCP, the ruling party and the opposition NC (Nepali Congress) are staking their claims to the top position in the legislature in this clash. 

NCP is working on a strategy to bring in their own man or woman as Speaker, with the opposition party demanding that the position of either speaker or deputy speaker should be given to them as per their Constitution. 

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(With Inputs from ANI)