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Protests Erupt in Nepal Following New Administrative Division Agreement

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An agreement to divide Nepal into six provinces prompted a violent protest in the mid-western Surkhet District.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — An agreement to divide Nepal into six provinces, signed by country's four major political parties, prompted a violent protest in the mid-western Surkhet District on Monday, The New York Times reported.

An agreement on Nepal's internal boundaries' redrawing, reached on Saturday night, introduced the division of the country’s mid-west into separate provinces, a move which faced fierce objections by province's residents. The protests turned violent in Surkhet District, some 500 km (311 miles) from the capital Kathmandu.

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According to The New York Times, protesters vandalized political parties' and government offices, as well as the houses of lawmakers in Surkhet before the police opened fire at them, killing two people and seriously wounding at least six.

“I don’t know why they are doing this while I am strongly lobbying to name Surkhet as provincial capital of the region,” a lawmaker for the governing Nepali Congress party in Surkhet, Purna Bahadur Khadka, was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Protests reportedly broke out in other districts in Nepal’s mid-western region.

“The demarcation deal can be reviewed, but protest is not a solution,” the media quoted one of the signatories on the agreement, chairman of the Maoist party Pushpa Kamal Dahal, as saying.

Nepal has struggled to create a new political system which would replace a centuries-old monarchy, which ended in 2008 after long civil war between the government and Maoist insurgents.

The main political parties agreed on a draft constitution in June, but the internal administrative division had been left undefined.

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