NEW DELHI, INDIA, October 28, 2015: (HPI Note: We include this story only because what to us seems a major diplomatic issue with considerable consequence to the Hindus of Nepal is largely ignored in the world press.)
India’s strategic establishment was scrambling this evening to counter Nepal’s biggest diplomatic swerve away from New Delhi in years after Kathmandu inked a pact to import fuel from Beijing. The first such deal in four decades was sealed amid a blockade along Nepal’s border with Bihar. The agreement, signed by Nepal Oil Corp and Petro China in Beijing today, is being viewed as a message to New Delhi from Nepal that it had given up efforts to ease the blockade and was seeking a bear hug with India’s strategic rival, officials here said. China today promised gasoline worth $1.3 billion as a grant, beyond which Nepal can buy fuel under the agreement. Nepal has not bought fuel from China for four decades in a bid to pacify India.
The dramatic snub to India came just a week after Nepal’s new Prime Minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, had sent his deputy and foreign minister Kamal Thapa to India to reset ties hit by tensions over a new Nepal Constitution opposed widely in that country’s plains. Officials here have been saying Kathmandu cannot replace India as the primary route of imports. The inhospitable climate along Nepal’s border with China will not allow that, they insist. But today’s deal has triggered the first signs of self-doubt in that belief. The tensions and their clear beneficiary – China – have also cast a cloud on the effectiveness of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s unprecedented early outreach to Nepal, a country he visited twice within his first seven months in office.
Landlocked Nepal has for the past six weeks accused India of effectively engineering a blockade along the border – through which Nepal imports almost all its supplies. India has repeatedly denied the charge, insisting that the blockade was solely a consequence of protests by the Madhesi community that dominates the plains and is convinced the new Constitution denies them fair rights.