Senior Nepali communist leader to visit India

Nepal's former prime minister and CPN-UML leader Madhav Kumar Nepal is arriving in India Wednesday on a five-day visit during which he will meet Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and officials, a party leader said.

The visit of the three-member Unified Marxist-Leninist party delegation that also includes party secretary general Ishwor Pokhrel and member of the party's international relations department Rajan Bhattarai is being made at the invitation of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

"On Thursday, we will have meeting with Foreign Secretary Ranjan Mathai, and in evening we will meet Prime Minister Singh," Bhattarai told IANS.

They are also slated to meet External Affairs Minister Salman Khurshid and Congress chief Sonia Gandhi.

Ahead of the visit, Nepal, a senior leader of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) which came third in the 2008 polls, met President Ram Baran Yadav Tuesday and discussed a wide range of bilateral issues to be raised with Indian side.

In a bid to expanding fraternal relations with Indian communist parties, the visiting delegation will hold meeting with parties such as the Communist Party of India-Marxist, the Communist Party of India, the Forward Bloc and the Communist Party of India-Marxist-Leninist.

They will also meet leaders from the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Nationalist Congress Party, the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Janata Dal-United and representatives of Nepali community in India.

Nepal will deliver a lecture at the Indian Council of World Affairs on recent political developments in his country and upcoming constituent assembly elections. He will also visit and deliver a lecture at Nalanda University in Bihar.

The visit is the part of the Indian government's policy to expand talks and consultations with the Nepali political parties to further strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries.

As Nepal decides to go polls on Nov 19, India is vigorously engaging with Nepali political fraternity and asserting pressure on them not to move away from elections at any cost.

It had earlier hosted two high-profile visits. UCPN (Maoist) chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal alias Prachanda and senior Nepali Congress leader Sher Bahadur Deuba, both former prime ministers, had visited New Delhi separately and met senior Indian politicians and officials.