With the launch of official election campaign period, political parties and candidates have been canvassing votes for upcoming federal parliamentary and provincial assembly elections across the country.

But stiff competition among the contenders has resulted in somewhat unhealthy promotional activities whereby the opposing candidates are trading barbs at each other and launching scathing attacks against their rival candidates rather than talking about development issues.

Nepali Congress candidates are said to be propagating fear among public that if left alliance of CPN-UML and CPN (Maoist Centre) emerges victorious in the elections, they would impose authoritarian regime in the country. NC candidates argue that the public should cast their votes for NC in order to save the country from such anti-democratic practice.

On the other hand, candidates from left alliance have been appealing to the public to vote them for socialism. They argue that communist’s socialism is far better than NC’s democratic socialism.

Left alliance’s election candidates have urged public to vote them because they have majority in local level governance, therefore they could run the new government more effectively.

Maoist Centre leader Tara Narayan Shrestha said if communists were elected in all three tiers—local, provincial and federal—the task of constitution implementation could be done with much ease. He said there could be problem in the implementation of constitution if the leadership clash at these levels.

Locals have commented that in the past elections, leaders talked about development agendas instead of investing their time only in blame games.

“The major election slogans in the past elections were not only meant to tarnish the reputation of their rival candidates. Election candidates mostly talked about development,” said Nurbu Sherpa of Gumdel, adding, “But it looks like the development talks have not figured in their speeches this time. It has become hard to listen to leaders sharing their development plans.”

There have also been complains that the candidates use complex political jargons in their speech which are beyond comprehension of general voters. “Most of the things said by leaders who arrived from city were not understood by village dwellers,” said Sherpa, adding that voters simply recognized the party by their party flags.