A Secretariat meeting of the Nepal Communist Party held to discuss the stalled unification process ended inconclusively on Thursday after a task force formed to hammer out outstanding issues related to unification sought one more week to submit its final report.

The Nepal Communist Party was formed after the country’s two large communist forces—the CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Centre)—announced their formal merger in March last year—three months after they jointly swept the elections.

But the unification process has hit a snag due to outstanding issues ranging from managing leaders of both the parties at different levels and committees.

The Ram Bahadur Thapa-led task force has failed to submit the report.

In the meeting convened at Baluwatar on Thursday, task force coordinator Thapa apprised the meeting progress made so far by his team and sought one more week to submit the final report.

Other members of the task force also requested the Secretariat to give some more time to complete the remaining work.

Task force member Yogesh Bhattarai confirmed that they have sought one more week time to complete the task.

According to party spokesperson Narayankaji Shrestha, the party has not made any decision whether to provide [more] time to the task force or not. The next meeting has been scheduled for Friday.

Though the Secretariat, standing committee, central committee and province committee were formed after the unification of the two communist parties on May 17, 2018, the unification of district and former Maoist party’s people’s organisations is yet to be completed.

Although the committee had said that it would conclude the organisational unification by forming a task force, the process has been delayed as leaders have not been able to arrive at consensus on all the issues.

General Secretary Bishnu Paudel and Standing Committee members Shankar Pokharel, Surendra Pandey, Barshaman Pun, Lekhraj Bhatta, Yogesh Bhattarai, Beduram Bhusal and Raghubir Mahaseth are the members of the task force.