Barsha Man Pun “Ananta” of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) is a member of the Constituent Assembly as well as a member of the Maoist party’s Central Secretariat. During the ten-year insurgency, Pun served as deputy commander of the People’s Liberation Army. Although the armed struggle is over, Pun remains the PLA’s commander, responsible for overseeing Maoist combatants in the major cantonments spread throughout the country.Until two weeks ago, Pun was Peace and Reconstruction Minister in the UML-led government. It was widely known that there was a behind-closed-doors agreement between the Maoists and Prime Minister Khanal that Pun would soon be given the far more important position of Home Minister.But instead, the post was given to another Maoist leader, Krishna Bahadur Mahara. The last-minute switch, according to some sources, was because the other parties in the coalition government balked at having a Maoist military commander as Nepal’s home minister.If P.M Khanal was forced by the coalition government to name Mahara instead of Pun (in order to avoid controversy), he failed.Mahara returns to the limelight despite being involved in the vote-buying scandal last year in which he was taped during a phone conversation. He blatantly sought money from a Chinese businessman – votes that would have bought MPs’ support for Maoist Supremo Prachanda in the 2010 prime ministerial election. When the taped telephone conversation scandal was leaked to the media, Prachanda’s hopes of winning the election were, for all practical purposes, scuttled.
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