KATHMANDU -- Kumar Fudong, a retired Nepal Army general, recently formed a new political party, the Indigenous Mangolized Republican Party, in preparation for an election for members of a Constituent Assembly (CA) scheduled for November.

Early this month, Nepal's Election Commission (EC) called for registration of political parties that will be fielding candidates in the upcoming election.

"I felt that UCPN (Maoist) failed to address the issue of identity, so I formed a new party," Fudong told Xinhua on Monday.

After he retired from the army, Fudong joined UCPN (Maoist) party in 2007 and became a member of parliament but now he feels he has no future in the mother party.

While dozens of parties and individuals are registering with the EC, the CPN-Maoist, the breakaway faction of UCPN (Maoist), has declared that it won't register with the EC, though registeration is a must for any party to take part in an election.

The Election Commission, the constitutional body mandated for holding national and local elections, has started the registration and renewal process of political parties from May 1 to 29.

But the caretaker government of Nepal, called Interim Election Council headed by Chief Justice Khil Raj Regmi, is yet to announce the actual date of the election, more than one month and half after its formation.

Mohan Acharya, a teacher by profession, who hails from far- western Nepal, is also busy preparing the necessary documents for party registration. He said forming a party is one way of earning money in Nepal and also the best way to be known overnight. He did not explain why.

EC officials said that the number of political parties in the upcoming election would go up this time as alignments and realignments inside and among parties are likely to happen.

In the last five days, 30 political parties have submitted their applications for registration.

On May 1, cadres of UCPN (Maoist) and CPN-UML exchanged blows at the premises of EC as they outsmarted each other in trying to register their party first.

Out of 119 registered parties, 54 political parties had taken part in 2008 Constituent Assembly elections. Out of them 25 political parties were represented in the CA. Later, the number of parties in the CA reached 33 after some parties split and new ones were formed.

"The number of political parties in the upcoming CA election will increase since new groups or political parties have emerged," former Chief Election Commissioner Surya Prasad Shrestha told Xinhua.

In order to reduce the number of political parties, the EC has required a new party to attach the signature of 10,000 supporters in its application for registration.

But this provision is not applied to those parties who were represented in the dissolved CA. "To control fake signatures, we have adopted strict measures this time because we want less parties to be registered," an EC official said.

After the election in 2008, there was a wrangling among major parties to form a majority government. In order to be able to form a government, some parties sought the support of independent parties by offering them lucrative government portfolios.

Even a party with only one member in the parliament could land a ministerial post because a single vote could be vital in forming a majority government.

This gave an impression to the people that if a party is registered with the EC and it participates in the election, chances of becoming a minister overnight will increase. "This is one of the major reasons why people are scrambling at the EC to register new political parties," Shrestha said.

Under the existing laws, parties garnering 1 percent of the total cast vote would get a seat in the Constituent Assembly under the proportional representation system of election process.

Some observers are saying that an increase in number of parties will only aggravate the already unstable political situation in the country. "Parties should be formed on the basis of certain universal ideology," Shrestha said.

The dissolved CA had 33 political parties and that made decision making very difficult. If a single member of parliament obstructs the process, no decisions can be made and the government ceases to function.