The party was given 10 ministerial berths, of which eight will be held by new faces, while Bam Dev Gautam and Radha Gyawali have been allocated the remaining two.

The committee comprising party Chairman Jhala Nath Khanal, Parliamentary Party leader KP Sharma Oli and Vice-chairman Gautam had ignored requests from rank and file leaders on Monday night to pick their trusted allies as ministers instead of prioritsing election winners.

“The committee ignored our request not to pick leaders who are not in parliament,” said a Standing Committee member, referring to the selection of Mahendra Pandey, Radha Gyawali, Hari Parajuli, Lal Babu Pandit, Dal Bahadur Rana and Khagraj Adhikari.

Only Gautam, Bhim Acharya, Purushottam Poudel and Karna Bahadur Thapa are in the CA.

But Chairman Khanal defended the party’s decision, saying the selection was made with the view of sparing elected lawmakers who are required for the major task of drafting a constitution. UML Secretary Shankar Pokharel said that there is no standard rule to bar non-elected leaders in the party.

“Ministers were selected as per the need of the party. We considered regional and caste issues in our selection,” said Pokharel. He argued non-parliamentarians were named ministers in the past as well.

Dal Bahadur Rana, Radha Gyawali, and Hari Parajuli were selected from Gautam’s quota, while Karna Bahadur Thapa, Khagraj Adhikari and Mahendra Pande were named ministers from the Oli faction. Bhim Acharya and Purushottam Poudel are included from the Khanal camp. Lalbabu Pandit is, reportedly, a representative of senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal. Nepal opposed the decisions of the selection committee saying that he was ignored in the decision making process. Nepal had proposed Bhim Rawal as Foreign Minister against Oli’s plan to award party Secretary Bishnu Poudel the post.

Poudel, who had earlier demanded either the MoFA or Ministry of Information and Communications, refused to be inducted as a minister due to internal feuds and the fact that the Information Ministry was allocated to the NC.

Gokarna Bista who gained his reputation as energy minister in the Jhala Nath Khanal-led government was also likely to return to his old ministry. Leaders said Bista’s name was deleted at the last hour, while the idea to select the party’s youth leader Rabindra Adhikari was dropped after the Oli faction pressured them to pick Khagraj Adhikari as a minister from the western region. Both Rabindra Adhikari and Khagraj Adhikari are from Pokhara though represent different factions within the party. Khagraj is a close confidant of Oli, while Rabindra is close to Vice-chairman Gautam.

Mahendra Pande, who is the party’s education department head, is a former associate professor at the Tribhuvan University. Originally a communist cadre from Nuwakot district, he had joined politics fulltime after quitting the teaching profession in 1991. He won from Nuwakot-3 in the 1999 general election and became the party’s chief whip in the revived parliament in 2006.

Pandey was appointed member-secretary of the Social Welfare Council during the Manmohan Adhikari-led government.

Gyawali had refused to join the Jhala Nath Khanal government as the state education minister, arguing that her junior was appointed as a minister. The party later decided to send her as energy minister in the Baburam Bhattarai-led government. But it was a brief stint as she resigned from the post after just 12 days after the party decided leave the government, expressing dissatisfaction over its working style.

Parajuli, a trusted man of Gautam, is leader of the All Nepal Peasant Federation. Purushottam Poudel had won elections twice from Bara district and was a political advisor of Jhala Nath Khanal after he was elected PM in 2011. This time, he was elected as a lawmaker from Bara-6.

Bhim Acharya had joined politics as a student leader. He was elected from Saunsari districts in the 2008 and 2013 CA elections. In the previous CA election, he was the chief whip of the party.

Gautam, a two-time DPM with the Home Ministry portfolio, was elected in the recent election from Bardiya and Pyuthan districts.