Balen Shah's Nepal Dream: Bulldozers and Broken Promises

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The rapper-turned-mayor who cleaned Kathmandu’s streets and displaced its poorest vendors is now running for prime minister — but three years of mixed governance leave a country still searching for an answer

By TRH World Desk

New Delhi, March 28, 2026 — Three years ago, Balendra Shah won Kathmandu’s mayoral race on a scooter, a microphone, and a promise to speak for the people no one else would. Today he is the prime minister of Nepal. Leading Rastriya Swatantra Party, Shah blew away entrenched political outfits in Nepal’s elections.

Shah drew thousands at rallies across Jhapa, Janakpur, and Ilam — and arriving, until public backlash forced a reversal, in a Land Rover Defender worth upwards of Rs42 million. That image, more than almost anything else from his tenure, captures the tension at the centre of Balen Shah’s political story.

Writing in The Kathmandu Post, journalists Gaurav Pokharel and Lekhnath Pant offer the most forensic examination yet of whether Shah’s disruptive mayoral model can scale to national governance — and their conclusion is uncomfortable for both his supporters and his critics.

The wins are real. So are the costs.

Shah’s record in Kathmandu carries genuine achievements. Scholarship schemes were digitalised and made merit-based. Illegal hoardings came down. Ambulance services expanded. Tukucha river was partially uncovered. Building-code violators who had operated with impunity for years faced demolitions — including, reportedly, a structure belonging to one of Shah’s own friends.

But the same administration left municipal employees unpaid for 103 days during a prolonged bureaucratic standoff. Capital expenditure sat at a staggering 12.39 percent of allocation. And the street vendors Shah once championed in song found themselves displaced by the very metropolitan police reporting to him.

Arjun Bhattarai, a vendor from Shah’s own ancestral district of Mahottari, put it plainly to the Post: “Before the election, the mayor told us he would manage a place for us, but later, when we asked to be allowed to earn a living, I ended up with a broken head.”

The restriction allowing vendors to operate only after 7:30 pm drew particular scorn. “Who is going to come shop at that hour in this cold?” asked one displaced vendor quoted by Pokharel and Pant.

The urban planning question

Dr Pitambar Sharma, urban planning expert and former vice-chair of the National Planning Commission, framed the governance failure precisely. “Someone arriving in Kathmandu might feel the city looks cleaner,” he told the Post, “but the real question is: who is this city for? Is it only for the wealthy or also for the poor?” Sharma noted that cities across the West designate times and zones for street vending rather than eliminating it — and that Shah “ended up as a mayor who doesn’t engage in dialogue with his citizens.”

The scaling problem

Milan Pandey, co-founder of the Bibeksheel Party and a long-standing acquaintance of Shah, credits him with genuine ideological conviction. “He believed alternative forces could emerge if politics spoke the language of the people,” Pandey told the Post. But Pandey’s framing itself points to the limitation: speaking the language is not the same as governing in it.

Former ambassador Vijay Kant Karna is more direct about the geopolitical stakes. “Nepal’s geopolitics requires understanding of the relationships we need to serve our national interests,” he told the Kathmandu daily. “Balen cannot function in the role the way he did as a mayor of a city.”

The country he wants to lead sits between India and China — the very nations Shah attacked in a late-night Facebook post he deleted within 30 minutes after it drew 34,000 reactions.

The verdict so far

Dr Sanduk Ruit, the ophthalmologist and Ramon Magsaysay laureate, sees Shah as a necessary corrective to Nepal’s captured establishment. “He has given hope to millions at home and abroad,” Ruit told the Post. “But he cannot afford to repeat the mistakes of the old leadership.”

Shah himself once wrote, on Facebook in May 2017, that he would vote for himself because he knew how to develop the country. Few believed him then. He made good on the municipal half of that promise. Whether the national half follows — or whether disruption without institutional patience simply relocates Nepal’s dysfunction rather than solving it — remains, as Pokharel and Pant conclude, an open question.