Seven Nepali Congress youth leaders have demanded an early general convention of the party to reinvigorate the party. During the ongoing Central Working Committee meeting on Tuesday, the youth leaders submitted a 51-page concept paper to the party leadership digging out the reasons behind the Congress’ poor showings in three tiers of elections held last year and offering a future course for the party. The CWC meeting is set to conclude on Wednesday with the announcement of date for the Mahasamiti meeting where the party is likely to conduct a post-mortem of its election results.

NC leader Gagan Thapa presented the paper on behalf of fellow youth leaders Chandra Bhandari, Pradip Poudel, Guru Raj Ghimire, Dhanraj Gurung, Ram Krishna Yadav and Jeevan Pariyar.

In the paper, they have pointed out several reasons for the party’s poll debacle, undelining its failure to connect with people and delusion over social issues that needed to be addressed while in power.

“The party also failed to utilise the repeated opportunities it has had since 1991. Our vote banks continued to erode and we could not attract new voters particularly in urban region,” says the paper.

Party’s weak organisation is another factor that held it back from gaining momentum in various sectors, according to the paper. “The NC is a cadre-based party but we tend to forget this notion and always misinterpreted it as a mass-based party.”

Urging the party leadership to call an early general convention of the party, the youth leaders have said in the document that it would help the party win the next elections. “We need to convince another 1.5 million voters to win the next elections,” the paper says.

The leaders, however, were appreciative of the NC leadership for successfully holding three tiers of elections.

They have also provided comparative statistics of the voting patterns in the elections from 1991 to 2017, under the heading “Why NC’s votes did not increase and what went wrong’.

Over the last 26 years, the NC has abandoned several social issues related to several clusters of the society, the leaders stated in the paper, “And we started disengaging ourselves with the society which was a major weakness that waned our vote bank.

Urging the party leadership to bind every one together and devise a fresh strategy—to attract 1.5 million party loyalist to rebound to power in five years—they have also called on the party leadership to amend the party charter through the next Mahasamiti meeting for an early general convention.