Mumbai : Long before he was campaigning across Nepal, Balendra Shah (popularly called Balen) was a battle rapper, trading insults and one-liners with rival MCs. In battle rap, the rules are simple: read the room, anticipate your opponent’s angle of attack, and make sure it’s your punchline that delivers the knockout blow. Shah was great at it, judging by his viral Raw Barz battle video with fellow Nepali rapper, Litl Grizl from 2013, which has racked up 14 million views till date.
A decade later, the same instincts have helped propel him from an underground rapper to one of the country’s most powerful political figures.
“He just has a lot of swagger, with the way he dresses, the sunglasses, the machismo,” says Pratistha Rijal, a research analyst at Kathmandu’s Institute for Integrated Development Studies. “And there’s the novelty of him going from a music career to a political career, which made him a fresh new face and an appealing alternative.”
The 35-year-old is now set to become Nepal’s next—and youngest—prime minister after defeating KP Sharma Oli, Nepal’s four-time PM from Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) in the latter’s stronghold, the Jhapa-5 constituency. Shah joined the reformist Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) last September; the party won 125 of the 165 seats that are elected directly. If final results reflect the current tally, the RSP will have secured a landslide victory, a likely total of around 176 seats, just short of the 183 needed for a supermajority.
Snap elections were conducted after Oli’s government resigned in September 2025, following the ‘Gen Z protests’, dubbed so for the mostly young composition of protestors fighting entrenched corruption and social inequality in the Himalayan Republic. Shah, who was mayor of Kathmandu at the time, was one of the most vocal backers of the protests though he never attended a single one.
His track Nepal Haseko (“Nepal is smiling”), first released in 2015 but re-released last year, became an anthem. His name was pushed by protesters to head the interim government that would replace Oli, although Sushila Karki, the former chief justice of Nepal, was eventually picked for the job. It’s that same wave of anger and disaffection that saw Oli’s ouster—amplified by the deaths of 77 people, mostly protesters—which has now carried him to the helm.
The fourth son of an Ayurveda practitioner and homemaker, Shah’s political awareness began in his youth. One of the first songs he wrote as a teenager was Sadak Balak. Over downtuned guitars and MIDI-drum beats, he rapped from the perspective of a Kathmandu street kid who demands his rights and his dignity. “One day, may someone recognise us as human beings/ But a wish is just a wish, a dream that won’t come true,” Shah raps in slam-poetry cadence. The song came out in 2012, part of a wave of socially conscious rap music that sprang up across the Global South, partly inspired by the Arab Spring and its videos of rappers performing to thousands of protesters at Egypt’s Tahrir Square.
YouTube’s push to make its platform more accessible to content creators aided Shah, whose tracks offered scathing takedowns of the political class, corruption and nepotism. Tathya (2013) spoke about the double speak of news media and political propaganda. Balidan (2019) called out political opportunism that underpinned nationalism and revolution. He racked up millions of views, and soon, young protestors were singing his lyrics.
“He used to satirise or knock the politicians of Nepal through his music,” says fellow rapper Prakash Neupane. “And his songs are very poetic, people loved his words.”
He wasn’t the most technically gifted rapper, and he was prone to the occasional lyrical clunker, like “get Kylie in sundress to undress to fundraise” from a 2020 song Savage. Nor was his political critique grounded in the solid ideological foundations of American conscious rappers like KRS-One and his idol Tupac Shakur, both shaped by Black radicalism and left-wing politics. But his commitment to pushing for social and political change was not in doubt.
In fact, Shah announced his political ambition over a social media post in 2017, after a provincial election in which he did not vote— “I’ll vote next time and vote [for] myself. I will develop my nation.”
For many young Nepalis, that political focus was the change they sought. Nepal’s post-monarchy era initially held out a great promise of equality. It has, however, been marked by frequent government changes, corruption scandals and dynastic politics.
Rap helped Shah’s online audience grow, and he soon gained a reputation as a politically outspoken artist. In 2022, he won the election for mayor of Kathmandu as an independent candidate — a post he only resigned from earlier this year to stand for national elections.
The qualities that make for a compelling rapper do not always translate smoothly into governance. As mayor of Kathmandu, his aggressive rhetoric has also landed him in trouble. When Kathmandu police stopped his official car at a roadblock, with his wife as the passenger, he tweeted a threat to set Singha Durbar (the Nepali government’s seat of power) on fire. Last November, he posted an F-bomb laden attack on the US, India, China and Nepali political parties (including the RSP) on Facebook before deleting it half an hour later.
As one Kathmandu Post editorial from 2023 put it, “In his heart, [Shah] is still a rapper out there to diss and destroy his imaginary opponents.”
Shah’s political style draws heavily from his experience as a rapper. Rather than the marathon speeches favoured by traditional politicians, he often communicates sparingly—sometimes appearing briefly at rallies, waving to crowds, and leaving the message to circulate online. When he does speak, it’s in the language of the people—simple, direct, and unapologetically blunt.
He has also cultivated a persona that oozes machismo. Dark glasses, black clothing and an air of deliberate distance have helped construct a figure who is both accessible and slightly enigmatic, with an aura of mystique. By being loquacious, he has allowed supporters to project their own hopes onto him—a blank slate for voters frustrated with traditional politics.
The change that so many young Nepalis fought—and died—for is now here. The old guard has been crushed, and a new, untested generation of politicians have taken over the reins. The question facing Nepal is whether the instincts that made Balen Shah compelling on the microphone—swagger, defiance and a knack for reading the mood of the crowd—can survive the far less forgiving rhythms of national politics.