Modi will receive EPG report soon: Rajan Bhattarai

“OLI AND DAHAL HAS NOT AGREED TO LEAD GOVT IN TURNS”

KATHMANDU, Oct 22: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi will receive the Eminent Persons Group report very soon, said Dr. Rajan Bhattarai, foreign affairs advisor of Prime Minister K P Sharma Oli.

The EPG, a joint mechanism consisting of experts and intellectuals from Nepal and India to study and report and the overall relations between the two neighbors including 1950 Peace and Friendship Treaty, trade, environment, border and hydropower, prepared a joint report during its ninth meeting on June last year.

Amid reports that Modi is not satisfied with the EPG report, Bhagat Singh Koshiyari, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, in March, had assured that Modi would receive the report once the Lok Shabha Election (scheduled for 11 April 2019 to 19 May 2019) was over.

However, the Indian government is yet to receive the EPG report.

“We are holding a discussion on this. We should not run after the reports that Indian PM Modi is reluctant to accept the reports,” said Bhattarai, who represented the Nepali side during the EPG meeting, in a radio interview on Tuesday.

On the occasion, Bhattarai also took the time to say that PM Oli and Nepal Communist Party Chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal had not reached any understanding to lead the government in turns.

Bhattarai’s statement contrasts Chair Dahal’s claim that they (Oli and Dahal) have agreed to become prime minister based on equality for equal periods of time.

Dahal, in a television interview in May this year, had also said he was optimistic about getting the premiership as per the agreement reached between the two chairs during the unification.