Kathmandu: Nepal`s ruling Maoist party on Tuesday split with a faction led by hardliner Mohan Vaidya `Kiran` forming a breakaway party to denounce India, raising fears that his cadres might return to arms again.
Announcing the split in the UCPN (Maoist) at the end of a three-day national conclave, Vaidya said his group will never accept the Parliamentary system and threatened to launch what he called "peoples revolt" or "peoples war" to establish a "New Peoples Republic" in the country.
Taking a hard anti-India posture, the leader of the new breakaway group, which named itself as Nepal Communist Party-Maoist, demanded scraping all the unequal treaties signed with India, including Nepal-India Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1950.
Vaidya also demanded withdrawal of permission to Indian companies to construct Upper Karnali and Arun Third hydropower projects as he claimed these agreements were against the national interest.
The Maoist break up would pose new challenges in Nepal, which has struggled to implement a peace process after the end of 10-year bloody civil war in 2006. An estimated 16,000 people were killed in the so called 1996-2006 peoples` war fought by the Maoists against the state.
Branding Maoist chief Prachanda and Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai as "neo-revisionists" and agents of "expansionists", Vaidya charged India had expanded its interference in the country during their stewardship of the party.
He said the Prachanda-Baburam faction had "sabotaged the achievements of Peoples War and Peoples Movement" by dissolving the Peoples Liberation Army.
The split in Nepal`s dominant Maoist party plunged the country into a deeper political turmoil after parliament was dissolved in chaos.
PTI
