by Our Foreign Desk

NEPAL ended five months of fuel rationing yesterday after India’s unofficial border blockade collapsed.

Happy Kathmandu residents lined up at petrol stations to fill up their cars, while bus passengers waited in orderly queues, no longer forced to climb on top of vehicles.

National firm Nepal Oil official Deepak Baral said: “The lifting of the rationing of fuel should end long queues at service stations and end difficulties for consumers.”

For five months, New Delhi had refused to intervene as border guards blocked lorries from crossing into the landlocked country which relies on trade with its southern neighbour.

Guards claimed lorry drivers were at risk from Madhesi nationalist protesters who had set up camp on the border.

The Madhesis are demanding the revision of the boundaries of the seven federal states defined by Nepal’s new secular republican constitution, which was passed last year by the communist-dominated parliament.

United Democratic Madhesi Front leader Laxman Lal Karna warned yesterday: “We have only changed our method of protest. We can again shut down the border if the government does not agree to our demands.”

The royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal, led by Deputy Prime Minister Kamal Thapa, has also protested against the secular nature of the post-monarchy constitution, demanding that Nepal be declared a Hindu state.

Mr Thapa, a former home minister under King Gyanendra until the royal dictatorship’s overthrow by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) in 2006, failed to negotiate a lifting of the blockade with his fellow Hindu chauvinists in India’s BJP government.