Nepali Congress youth leader Gagan Thapa will lead the party’s central publicity and communication committee during the upcoming federal and provincial elections.

A meeting of the party’s central elections mobilisation committee on Wednesday constituted a subcommittee led by Thapa who also headed the party’s publicity wing during the recently concluded local level elections.

According to an NC statement, the Thapa-led committee has 42 members, most of them journalists affiliated to the party. Senior journalists Kishor Nepal, Harihar Birahi, Purushottam Basnet, Hom Raj Dahal, Tara Nath Dahal, Suresh Acharya and Dharmendra Jha are among the members but there is not a single woman journalist.

The central election mobilisation committee coordinator, Bal Krishna Khand has claimed that the NC will win a majority of seats in the elections as the party has fielded the highest number of candidates. The rival leftist alliance has fielded common candidates, in a 60:40 share between the CPN-UML and the CPN (Maoist Centre).

Speaking at a programme organised to inaugurate the media centre of the party on Wednesday, Khand claimed that the NC, which has fielded candidates in 154 of the total 165 House of Representatives seats and 310 of the 330 state assembly seats, would win 55 percent first-past-the-post seats and 45 percent proportional representation seats.

He likened the elections to a referendum between “stability to democracy” and “establishing a communist rule” in the country.

The NC has announced to establish media centres in all the seven provinces in the next few days. Party sources said the media centre for Province 1 will be set up in Itahari and that for Province 2 in Janakpur. The media centres in provinces 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 will be set up in Birgunj, Pokhara, Chitwan, Butwal, Nepalgunj, Surkhet and Dhangadi, respectively.