By Sudeshna Sarkar

Kathmandu, Sep 5 (IANS): Facing a growing public debate in Nepal on whether the opposition Maoist party had sought NRS 500 million from friends in China to bribe over four dozen MPs ahead of a crucial election Sunday, the former rebels have retaliated by blaming the country they love to hate - India.

The retaliation comes after the appearance of an audio tape that purportedly caught Maoist lawmaker Krishna Bahadur Mahara in a telephonic conversation with a male caller.

The caller indicated a friend in China was willing to pay NRS 500 million to buy 50 MPs from ethnic parties to vote for Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda in Sunday's prime ministerial election.

On Sunday, the Maoists began a counterattack, saying India's external intelligence agency, Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), was behind the tape.

"RAW made and distributed the fake news audio tape," the Maoist mouthpiece Janadisha daily said Sunday in a front-page article.

It claimed that after it had become certain that the Maoists, the largest party in parliament, were going to win Sunday's election, the RAW distributed the tape among Nepal's media and pressured them to broadcast it as "another weapon" to foil a Maoist victory.

It also alleged that the tape was an attempt to split the Maoists. The daily quoted Mahara as saying that the bribery slur was unbelievable as it was not the policy of his party to buy MPs.

Mahara, the current foreign affairs chief of the party, said there was growing speculation in Nepal's "lanes and by-lanes" that the tape was the handiwork of India and smacked of an attempt to deliberately drag China into the dispute.

The Maoist lawmaker, who returned from a trip to China recently, said he discussed the tape with the Chinese ambassador to Nepal, Qiu Guohong, and the envoy assured him that the furore would not affect China's relations with the Maoists.

Despite Mahara's claim that his party was assured of victory in Sunday's election, indications were that even the unprecedented sixth round of vote to elect a new premier for Nepal, over two months after Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal resigned, would end in a fiasco.

The ruling Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (UML) said it would not vote, just as it had abstained in the earlier rounds.

A front of four ethnic parties from the Terai plains - who have been also dragged willy-nilly into the MP sale scandal - has also decided not to vote.

Also, despite the Maoist denial that they were planning to buy votes, there have been growing allegations from the parties themselves that the former rebels were "capable of doing anything to come to power".

Just before the tape scandal erupted, a fringe Communist party leader had alleged that he was offered NRS 50 million to vote for Prachanda.

C.P. Mainali's Communist Party of Nepal-Marxist Leninist was split during the prime ministerial polls with the breakaway faction voting for the Maoists.