By Deepak Adhikari

KATHMANDU, Nepal

Foreign names based on famous universities and football clubs should be dropped by schools in Nepal, according to a radical Maoist faction. 

The All Nepal National Independent Students' Union (Revolutionary), a student wing of Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), last week sent letters to schools and colleges in capital Kathmandu demanding they change their names.

The group said names such as NASA, White House, Liverpool, Chelsea, Oxbridge, among others, did not comply with a 2012 government order banning the foreign names.

“The schools and colleges must implement the agreement of August 5, 2012, when the government agreed to our demands of removing such names,” the group’s president, Sarad Rasaili, told Anadolu Agency.

“They should not blindly copy and name educational institutions after football clubs and foreign cities. This is not simply about names, but also about our nationalism and our pride,” he said, adding that the schools and colleges had two weeks to make changes.

Rasaili said a handful of schools and colleges had complied with the government directive but more than 200 were still using foreign names.

 On Wednesday, the group torched a bus of the Modern Indian School, which is modeled after Indian curricula, claiming that the institution was illegally operating in Nepal.