Nepal Notebook

By Bhola B Rana

Kathmandu, 8 Feb: Saturday was a pretty eventful day.
Reports from New Delhi say India has sought the extradition of Dr Amit Kumar who arrested in Chitwan from a jungle resort Thursday.
Interpol had issued a red corner notice for the arrest of Dr Kumar who was running an international racket in kidney trade.
The international racket had spread to Europe and Nepal where it was reported he was running a secret hospital with the help of a government minister who hasn’t been identified as yet.
India has sought Dr Amit’s extradition even without a new extradition treaty objected and stalled after Maoist objection.
Nepalhas publicly extradited one Indian national—a sardar for the murder of then Punjab chief minister Pratap Singh Kairon during the King Mahendra era.
To recall, India didn’t arrest or extradite top Maoist leaders, Prachanda or Baburam Bhattarai, when they were secretly being nurtured by India during the people’s war before April 2006.
The extradition of the sardar took a long legal process; the present government is too weak and is unlikely to delay a formal request from the Indian government for extradition.
CONGRESS MEET DISTURBANCE
A Nepali Congress election meeting was disturbed again Friday.
Maoists didn’t permit the meeting in the remote hill district of Baitadi which Maoists claimed in their base area.
Former minister and Congress central committee member Dilendra Prasad Badu was seriously injured during a Maoist assault in Darchula, Maoists booed former Sher Bahadur Deuba at another meeting in Rukum.
Congress is being hounded by Maoists in the mid and far-West; every meeting addressed by Deuba ha been bombed in the terai.
Chairman Prachanda and top Nepali Congress leaders discussed the disturbances in the capital Saturday.
Congress retaliated he murderous attack on Badu with police raids on YCL district offices in Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur; hundreds police lifted a seize on the a captured government facility in Lalitpur Saturday used to house a Maoist cultural troupe.
NORWAY
Yet, visiting Norwegian Prime Minister Jans Stoltenberg got an assurance from his Nepalese counterpart Girija Prasad Koirala Friday he will hold promised constituent assembly elections 10 April.
Koirala had given such assurances without fulfilling them.
Stoltenberg came to push elections like USA and UK despite the lack of an environment for it; government doesn’t have the money for it either; donors have assured three billion rupees in assistance.
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