By Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu, Jan 5 (IANS) Ahead of Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna’s visit to Nepal from Jan 15, the opposition Maoist party will start anti-India protests that will climax in torching bilateral pacts with India, the chief of the former guerrillas said.

Maoist supremo and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda Tuesday told the media his party would start protest rallies in the disputed Nepali territories that Nepal says have been encroached upon by Indians.

From Monday - four days ahead of Krishna’s arrival in Kathmandu - Prachanda and other top leaders of the once underground party will stage protest marches in such occupied land, Prachanda said.

The 56-year-old himself will lead protests in the most controversial area - the Kalapani, a 370 sq km tract in Darchula district on the border Nepal shares with India and China.

Indian troops set up a base in Kalapani in 1962 to repel Chinese forces after China attacked India. Though the Sino-Indian war has ended, the troops have not been recalled still.

Prachanda’s deputy and former finance minister Baburam Bhattarai will head a protest march in Susta, another hotly contested area in Nawalparasi district in western Nepal.

Two other top leaders, Mohan Vaidya Kiran and Narayan Kaji Shrestha, will lead protests respectively in Pashupatinagar in Ilam district bordering India’s West Bengal, and the Laxmanpur barrage on the Rapti river that Nepal says causes inundation in this country.

Prachanda also said that during the fourth phase of the anti-government protests, his party would torch in public copies of the bilateral treaties signed with India that are detrimental to Nepal.

They include the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship and the Mahakali Treaty of 1996.