RALLY FOR EQUAL RIGHTS: Nepalese women participate in a protest rally organised to put pressure on constitution assembly members for the equal rights as men in the new constitution, at Baneswor in Kathamndu.

AFP, IANS
Kathmandu
Protesters dragged a wounded police officer out of an ambulance and killed him yesterday in an area of southern Nepal where anger is running high after four demonstrators were shot dead by security forces.
The officer was being taken to hospital after being beaten by protestors on his way to work in the southeastern district of Mahottari when a mob forced the ambulance to stop before dragging him out and torching the vehicle.
The incident came on the same day police shot dead a female protester in Mahottari, where hundreds defied a curfew imposed after three people were also shot dead as they demonstrated against a proposed new constitution.
“A crowd of about 150 stopped and surrounded the ambulance, dragged him out to a field nearby and killed him. The ambulance was torched,” a spokesman for the armed police force Pushpa Ram KC said.
More than 30 people including 11 police officers and an 18-month-old boy have been killed in violent clashes between security forces and protesters against a proposed new constitution that would divide the Himalayan nation into
seven provinces.
Anger is running particularly high in the country’s southern plains, where historically marginalised communities including the Madhesi and Tharu ethnic minorities say the new internal borders will limit their political representation.
The latest incident comes after three demonstrators were shot dead when police opened fire during a protest in
Mahottari on Wednesday.
The police spokesman said the fate of the ambulance driver and another officer in the vehicle was unknown, although a Red Cross representative who was in the ambulance is safe.
“We are investigating what happened,” he said.
Nepal’s human rights commission on Friday urged both sides to engage in peaceful dialogue and said the government should withdraw troops deployed
to try to maintain order.
Work on a new national constitution began in 2008, two years after the end of the Maoist insurgency that left an estimated 16,000 people dead and brought down the 240-year-old Hindu monarchy.  
But negotiations faltered over the issue of internal borders and the resulting uncertainty left Nepal — one of the world’s poorest countries — in political limbo.
CONSTITUTION DRAFTING DEFERRED: Nepal’s major political parties yesterday decided to postpone for two days the process of drafting the new constitution to enable creation of a conducive atmosphere for talks with agitating political parties who are opposing the seven-province model in the proposed federal set-up.
A meeting of three major political parties - Nepali Congress, Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) or CPN-UML and the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) or UCPN-M - at Prime Minister Sushil Koirala’s official residence decided to postpone the statute-drafting process until Sunday morning and renewed the call for the agitating
parties to come for talks.
“We have urged the agitating parties to come for talks as one of their major demands has been fulfilled,” UCPN-M vice chairman
Narayan Kaji Shrestha said.
Though the combined strength of the agitating Madhesis and Tharus is not significantly large in the 601-seat constituent assembly where the constitution-drafting process is on, these indigenous population-groups in the Nepali terai represent nearly half of the Himalayan
nation’s 28mn populace.
Leaders in both the government and the opposition would hold formal and informal talks with the agitating parties within two days, Shrestha said, adding that there was no other way to reach
a political resolution except talks.
As the process to draft the constitution of Nepal is nearing its end, dissatisfaction over the seven-province model has ignited the southern plains of Nepal.