The leadership of Nepali Congress (NC) is increasingly finding itself under pressure to clarify about its stance regarding monarchy.

On Wednesday, a group of district presidents of the party urged the Prime Minister and president of NC Girija Prasad Koirala to determine party’s official position vis-à-vis the institution of monarchy.

On the same day, an active pro-republican central leader of NC Narahari Acharya fired another salvo at his party boss for not switching his stance towards republic.

Acharya claimed that if the NC leadership dares to embrace republic, “the King will just vacate the throne.”

And there is the mounting pressure from the Maoists on the NC to join the republican front. “If the NC joins the front, we are willing to drop 100 percent of our weapons,” Dev Gurung, a member of Maoist talks team, had said earlier.

The NC leadership, particularly PM Koirala, however, does not seem to budge from the stance of ‘ceremonial monarchy.’ PM Koirala has been saying that his party would let the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly (CA) decide about the fate of monarchy. “Our party will follow the decision of the people (through CA),” he told reporters last week in Biratnagar.

Even though reports say there has been agreement, more or less, on the issue of monarchy between the NC and the Maoists – with the former agreeing to nationalize the ancestral property of the King and the latter agreeing to let the powerless King continue till CA elections – the NC leadership continues to find itself under pressure from republicans within and outside its party organization.