KATHMANDU, Aug 25: Former Nepali prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, whose sacking last year sparked Nepal’s latest round of political instability, survived a rebel attack in the west of the country on Monday, police said.

The attack on Deuba came as Nepal’s main political parties launched a campaign to force King Gyanendra to sack the current prime minister and appoint a new government.

Maoist rebels, battling the government since 1996, fired at Deuba’s convoy as he was travelling in Kailali district, 550kms west of Kathmandu, to meet villagers affected by the insurgency, police said.

mr Deuba’s car was hit by gunfire but he escaped unhurt, police said.

King Gyanendra fired Mr Deuba and appointed a royalist in his place last October in a row over the timing of a general election that the rebels had threatened to disrupt.

Nepal’s main political groups have been protesting the move ever since and said on Monday they would step up their campaign and expected tens of thousands of people to converge on Kathmandu from Sept 4.

“We will launch a forceful and decisive protest movement,” Subash Nemwang, a senior leader of the Communist Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) party, Nepal’s second-largest party, said.

“We will bring the capital to a standstill.”

A similar campaign in 1990 ended decades of absolute monarchy and set up parliamentary democracy in the poor Himalayan nation wedged between India and China.—Reuters