Nepals

Kathmandu, Nepal – Facing thousands of raucous supporters, 35-year-old Balendra Shah lifted his signature black rectangular sunglasses, asked his audience to look him in the eye, and said: “I love you.”

It is a sentiment that millions of young Nepalis appear to reciprocate.

Balen – as he is popularly known – was a nobody until 2013, when he almost overnight became a rap sensation. Nearly a decade later, in May 2022, he stunned Nepal’s deeply entrenched mainstream political parties by winning the post of mayor of Kathmandu, the country’s capital, while contesting as an independent.

When the Himalayan nation of 30 million people erupted in popular protests against the government of then-Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli in September 2025, Balen emerged as a high-profile backer of the protesters. He was the first choice of many Gen Z activists to take over as interim leader after Oli was forced to resign. But he instead supported former Supreme Court Chief Justice Sushila Karki for the post. It is now that this was a tactical move.

As Nepal heads to its first election since the protests last year, and Karki’s brief term ends, Balen is positioning himself as the future prime minister the country needs. And true to style, he is doing it with a bang: He is contesting the parliamentary elections from Jhapa-5, a seat about 300km (186 miles) southeast of Kathmandu, against Oli, the man protesters deposed just five months ago.

On the surface, the odds appear stacked against him. The region is a stronghold of Oli and the Communist Party of Nepal – Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), which the former prime minister heads. Balen is contesting as a candidate of the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a centrist party formed less than four years ago, which won 10 percent of the national vote in the last elections in 2022.

Balen’s volatile public communication – he has abused mainstream parties, India, China and the United States, and threatened to burn down symbols of power in Nepal – has sparked criticism and questions over whether he is ready for high office.

But Balen defied the pundits when he won the Kathmandu mayoralty. And observers and analysts say that for many Nepalis, he represents a breath of fresh air in a country where more than 40 percent of the population is under the age of 35, but where the leadership of all major parties is in its 70s.

“Young Nepalis see him as a decisive actor, who is not beholden to traditional political or business interests,” Pranaya Rana, a journalist who writes for the Kalam Weekly newsletter, told Al Jazeera. “Many admire his macho public persona and his willingness to take on entrenched political patronage networks.”

The craze

If young Nepal burned with anger in September, when protesters clashed with security forces and attacked senior politicians after a crackdown by authorities under Oli, Balen was still seething with rage two months later.

In a midnight post on Facebook in November, he lashed out: “F*** America, F*** India, F*** China, F*** UML, F*** Congress, F*** RSP, F*** RPP, F*** Maobaadi. You Guys all Combined can do nothing”, venting against the popular political parties and even nations that have close ties to Nepal. Being the Kathmandu mayor at the time, he deleted the post less than half an hour later.

Then in January, he quit as mayor and joined the RSP, one of the parties he cursed in the Facebook post. More recently, after Oli called on Facebook for a public debate among prime ministerial candidates of major parties, Balen rejected the suggestion and asked the ex-prime minister to take responsibility for the dozens of civilians killed during the Gen Z protests in September. He asked Oli to acknowledge that he was a “terrorist”.

Over the top? Not to many Nepalis.

The rapper-turned-politician’s confrontational style and rhetoric appear to have only endeared him to large sections of the youth. His beard and dandy, all-black clothing style – he occasionally wears the traditional Newari dress of the ethnic inhabitants of the Kathmandu valley – coupled with his trademark dark glasses, have become fashion symbols.

Kathmandu shops once ran out of the kind of black rectangular glasses he wears. Many online stores, including Daraz, the most popular seller in Nepal, still carry multiple choices of these shades, calling them “Balen Shah glasses”.

Unlike traditional politicians, Balen mainly stays away from mainstream media. Instead, he communicates with the wider public through podcasts, television shows where he is a judge, or through his favourite platform: social media. His 3.5 million followers on Facebook, 1 million on Instagram, 400,000 on X and nearly 1 million on YouTube give him an online audience unmatched in Nepal.

This is valuable capital with a generation constantly on their phones.

Yet Balen first made waves not as a politician, but as an upstart musician who shook Nepal.

Big cars, bigger songs

The youngest of four siblings, Balen was born in 1990 in Kathmandu. Balen’s father, Ram Narayan Shah – who passed away in December – was a government practitioner of ayurveda, the ancient Hindu healing system.

In an interview with Al Jazeera in September – three months before his death – Shah recalled Balen as a “bright and simple” child. The father’s work took him away from home frequently, but one clear memory from Balen’s childhood stuck out for Shah: “He wrote poems. I remember that, because I also wrote poems.”

Balen graduated with a civil engineering degree from Himalayan Whitehouse International College in Kathmandu and received a postgraduate degree in structural engineering from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) in Karnataka, India.

Then, in 2013, he engineered his first major career transition. The setting was a popular rap battle in Nepal, called Raw Barz, in which two contestants face-off live against each other. One of the organisers of the competition, who requested anonymity, told Al Jazeera that Yama Buddha, a popular rapper who has since passed away, recommended Balen to him.

Balen won the rap battle, gaining instant popularity. “More than a rapper, he was a poet. He was very good lyrically, and talked about suppressed [people],” the contest organiser recalled.

In 2021, Shah announced his candidature for the mayoral election and revealed that he had been plotting the run for at least two years. He swept the election, winning 61,767 votes, defeating candidates from the major political parties, the Nepali Congress and Communist Party of Nepal (UML), who received 38,341 and 38,117 votes, respectively.

As mayor, according to his aide and press coordinator, Surendra Bajgain, Shah would arrive at his office at the Kathmandu Metropolitan City (KMC) at about 10am. He would first meet all the department heads, go through files, “seek clarity” on questions he had, and then sign files, Bajgain told Al Jazeera.

He would wear his trademark black jacket and pants, and black shades, every day to the office. He would remove his glasses inside the office, Bajgain said. “But you’ll see him in those glasses when taking pictures or in public,” he added.

As a mayor, he lived in government-provided accommodation in the heart of Kathmandu with his wife and an infant daughter. A gym regular, he preferred lunch at home, but would sip on endless cups of tea and coffee in the office.

To get away from the public gaze, Balen “loves to go on long rides outside the valley, because here, people surround him very often in public,” Bajgain said.

His passion for cars also landed him in controversy, widely circulated online, when he was seen driving an expensive Land Rover Defender worth 40 million Nepali rupees ($275,0000) in January, while campaigning in Jhapa 5, his electoral constituency, for the March 5 election.

Given his strong anticorruption image, the sight of him in a high-end luxury vehicle drew heightened scrutiny. Critics accused him of a lack of transparency over the vehicle’s ownership and use, while some pointed out that, despite promoting modesty in public office, he rarely used public transport as the mayor. The car, it turned out, had been given to him by a wealthy businessman for use during his campaign.

Balen is now also pursuing a PhD in traditional infrastructure at Kathmandu University. But he is far from a reluctant public figure, nor is he an ivory-tower researcher.

Balen’s songs, which mock political parties, criticise corruption and talk of the sacrifices of everyday Nepalis, have been the soundtrack to the efforts by Nepal’s Gen Z to reshape the country’s politics in recent months.

One song, Nepal Haseko (Nepal Smiling), became an anthem during last year’s protests, and already has more than 10 million views on YouTube. In the song, children sing in the chorus: “I want to see Nepal smiling; I want to see Nepalis living happily.”

Another song, Balidan (Sacrifice) has 14 million views on YouTube. It talks about impunity and corruption. On the Discord server “Youth Against Corruption”, where Gen Z protesters picked the country’s interim leader after Oli’s resignation in September, the name “Balen” was mentioned 16,328 times — far more than anyone else’s.

But Balen also has his critics.

‘Set on fire’

In 2023, when Balen was mayor, his wife was in his official vehicle when a traffic policeman stopped it. Balen was not in the car. The government-plated vehicle was being used on a public holiday, which gives traffic personnel the right to ask the purpose of the vehicle use and whether the driver has a permit for it.

On social media, Balen blew up about the incident: “If any of our KMC vehicles are stopped by the government from tomorrow, I will set the Singha Durbar on fire. Remember, you thief government”. Singha Durbar houses many administrative offices along with the Prime Minister’s Office.

The Oli government initially wanted to charge him for the incendiary statement, but backed off – Balen’s comment on social media had drawn support. It was a sign of things to come. During the Gen Z uprising in September, Singha Durbar was severely damaged after being set on fire.

In another instance, in 2023, after India installed a mural of “Akhand Bharat” (a Greater India) – encompassing many of its neighbours – Shah hung a “Greater Nepal” map in his office, including territories that once belonged to Nepal but now lie within India’s borders.

The move instantly escalated into a diplomatic hurdle. Shah was accused of going beyond his mandate as a municipal leader and stoking nationalist sentiment for political gains. His supporters, however, hailed his move as an assertive counter to foreign dominance.

In 2023, Balen also banned the screening of Indian films in Kathmandu, alleging that an Indian movie had suggested that Sita, one of Hinduism’s most revered goddesses, was born in India. In fact, she was born in present-day Nepal according to Hindu scriptures.

As Kathmandu mayor, Balen bulldozed illegal structures and ordered rubbish to be dumped outside government offices. He temporarily halted waste collection from Singha Durbar. The move was a riposte to what he argued was the central government’s failure to coordinate with the city to address Kathmandu’s chronic waste management crisis.

Yet to many belonging to the generation most hungry for change in Nepal, Balen has an allure no one else appears to have.

‘Shake up the status quo’

Aayal Sah, a 20-year-old first-time voter, is a resident of Janakpur – where Sita, the Hindu Goddess, is believed to have been born. He took three of his friends to see Balen’s first public appearance after joining the RSP. “I cannot directly vote for Balen as he is not contesting from our area, but I’ll surely vote for his party,” he told Al Jazeera.

Rana, the journalist at Kalam Weekly, said that for many, Balen “embodies the outsider spirit that many young Nepalis are looking for to shake up the status quo”.

Yet, Rana acknowledged, questions over Balen’s ability to lead Nepal linger as the country heads to elections. “A primary concern for most critics is Balen’s immaturity and his refusal to engage with the public. During his time as mayor, he gave no interviews to local media and did not answer any questions,” Rana told Al Jazeera.

After Oli quit office, when Gen Z protesters voted most for Balen to take over as interim leader on Discord, the then-mayor was not available on the phone when the youth movement’s leaders tried to reach him to see if he would take charge of the nation.

That, say analysts, was yet another example of Balen’s communication style: It is always one way, at his time and place of choosing.

But for many young Nepalis like Sah, the Janakpur resident, none of these chinks in Balen’s public life matter. “It’s the trust he has gained among the young people,” Sah said.

“He is the only one who can take the country forward.”