New Delhi: It’s a first. Nepal appears to have stood up to what it sees as the Modi government’s bullying tactics, and has bought petrol fuel from China after 40 long years.

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 dramatic snub to India came just a week after Nepal’s new Prime Minister, K.P. Sharma Oli, had sent foreign minister Kamal Thapa to India to sort out ties hit by tensions over India’s perceived support to protesting groups along Nepal’s border with India opposing the new Nepal Constitution.

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 alignment 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.

Indian Officials  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.

The Narendra Modi government 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.

As a Kathmandu resident Prabin Karki put it, ‘Modi’s ultra rightist political party is miffed because Nepal has shed its ‘Hindu Kingdom’ image for a truly secular and modern constitution, and has been covertly adding fuel to the protests in a section of the Nepal plains. Now we are fed up by this bossy big brother attitude, so what’s the problem if Nepal ties the rakhi around China’s wrist?”

  Nepal