Kathmandu, Oct 10 (IANS) While his party has kept parliament paralysed for nearly four months and refused to release child soldiers despite repeated urgings by the government and the international community, the chief of Nepal’s former Maoist guerrillas, Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda, will be embarking on a week-long China visit Sunday to better ties.
This will be Prachanda’s second trip to China since August 2008 when he triggered a controversy by choosing to visit Beijing immediately after assuming office as prime minister. By doing so, Prachanda departed from the tradition set by former Nepal premiers of visiting India first after assuming office.

The former revolutionary will be accompanied by Krishna Bahadur Mahara, Maoist lawmaker and current chief of his party’s foreign affairs wing, and his hawkish colleague Mohan Vaidya Kiran, who in the past had challenged Prachanda’s leadership.

The visit comes at a time the Maoists have kept up their siege on parliament, paying no heed to the UN or European Union that have repeatedly been calling for reconciliation between the former guerrillas and the ruling parties.

It also comes at a time the party has been censuring its leaders for going on foreign junkets. It has announced members would not be allowed to do so unless the trip is approved by the party leadership.

It was not known immediately why Prachanda is going to China when the peace negotiations in Nepal have been floundering and the promulgation of a new constitution by May 2010 seems an impossible task.

Mahara said it was intended to strengthen ties between the two countries and between the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Maoists.

Prachanda is expected to meet Chinese President Hu Jintao, who also heads the CPC, and other Chinese leaders.

The brief spell of honeymoon the former rebels had with the Indian government seems to have ended with New Delhi expressing dissatisfaction at the Maoists flouting the agreement they signed in 2006 to end the 10-year civil war.

India has been urging the Maoists to discharge the nearly 4,000 child soldiers and other illegal combatants they have in their People’s Liberation Army cantonments, to hand over the properties they seized during the insurgency and to abide by the law.

The Maoists allege that New Delhi manipulated the fall of their eight-month government because it was angered by Prachanda’s China trip in 2008.

Mahara said that the international community had failed to change its perspective of the Maoists even though they had ended the armed movement and won an election.

The former information and communications minister also said that India was behind almost 90 percent of the foreign intervention in Nepal while China accounted for about 10 percent.

It remains to be seen how New Delhi will regard the upcoming China trip, especially after Prachanda last month chose to make a hasty journey to Hong Kong to avoid meeting Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao when she visited Kathmandu.