THE NEPALI

The night before he was sworn in as Nepal’s prime minister, Balen Shah released a rap song. The track, “Jai Mahakali,” called for unity across the ethnic and regional lines that have for decades made Nepal so difficult to govern. His supporters shared it hundreds of thousands of times before dawn. The following morning, in black trousers, a matching jacket and his signature cloth cap, he took the oath of office and became the 47th prime minister of Nepal, its youngest ever and the first from the Madhesi community of the southern plains. That combination, the song and the ceremony, the artist and the engineer, the outsider and the head of state, tells you most of what you need to know about why this government feels different from everything that came before it, and why so many people with so many competing agendas are arguing about what it means.

His critics have settled, with some relish, on the comparison to Volodymyr Zelensky. The Ukrainian president was an actor and comedian before a Russian invasion thrust him onto the world stage, and the argument runs that Mr Shah, similarly unburdened by diplomatic training or foreign policy experience, risks steering a landlocked nation between two of the world’s most powerful and assertive states into exactly the kind of miscalculation that a more seasoned hand would avoid. Nepal sits between India and China, each of which has strong and sometimes contradictory ideas about what a well-governed Nepal should look like and neither of which is above expressing those ideas through infrastructure budgets, trade routes or quiet political pressure. The fear is that a prime minister who campaigns with the emotional directness of a rapper and governs with the impatience of an engineer might, in a moment of nationalist sentiment or diplomatic overreach, say or do something irreversible.

His admirers, for their part, have settled on a different comparison, one that flatters more generously and instructs more usefully. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s founding father, transformed a tiny resource-poor island with an anxious geography into one of the wealthiest and best-governed nations on earth through sheer administrative will, the ruthless deployment of talent, and an absolute refusal to tolerate the gap between what a government promises and what it delivers. The fans who invoke his name when they look at Mr Shah are pointing at something real. The 100-point reform agenda approved in the first cabinet meeting, with its tight deadlines, named responsible officials and public monitoring dashboard, is precisely the kind of governance-by-accountability that Mr Lee pioneered. The cabinet of technocrats and young professionals, filled on merit rather than by party affiliation, is a Singaporean instinct applied to a Himalayan state. The willingness to move fast, make enemies and trust that the mandate will hold long enough to do lasting damage to the old order is, unmistakably, the Lee Kuan Yew method.

The difference, and it is a crucial one that Mr Shah’s admirers should hold onto, is that Mr Lee built his miracle without democratic accountability and Mr Shah must build his with it. Singapore’s founding father managed elections to prevent any serious opposition from emerging, used defamation suits against critics and tamed the press into compliant silence. Mr Shah arrived in office having beaten a four-time prime minister in his own stronghold by nearly 50,000 votes, the largest winning margin in Nepal’s parliamentary history. His authority rests not on suppression but on an extraordinary act of public trust. That is both more demanding and more durable than anything Singapore’s model required. If Mr Shah delivers, Nepal will have proved something that Lee Kuan Yew never tried to prove, that a state can be both accountable and efficient, that democracy and competence are not, as the Singapore story seems to suggest, in tension with each other.

Nowhere is this argument more pointed than in the question of political party-affiliated unions. Mr Shah’s decision to dismantle party-linked bodies in government institutions, and to replace student political organisations on university campuses with non-partisan student councils, has been called his most controversial reform but, in the view of this media, his most necessary one. Nepal’s trade unions and student bodies have not, for the most part, functioned as the engines of worker protection and civic education that their defenders now claim. They have functioned as patronage machines, through which the major parties colonised the civil service, staffed ministries with loyalists, and ensured that every institution of the state was, at some level, an instrument of political survival rather than public service. A nurse who wanted a hospital posting, a teacher who wanted a school placement, an engineer who wanted a government contract learned quickly that the right union card mattered more than the right qualifications. It made it dishonest in ways so deep and so normalised that most Nepalis had stopped expecting anything different.

Dismantling that system is not an attack on organised labour or on student politics. It is an attack on the capture of both by party machines that used them as tools of control rather than protection. Workers in Nepal’s public sector will retain the right to organise; what they will not retain is the right to do so under banners that serve the interests of party leadership rather than their own. Students will continue to debate, advocate and push back against authority; what they will lose is the system by which Nepali Congress and UML and their various satellites used campus politics as a recruitment pipeline for future political operatives. This is an entirely defensible reform in a country where the blurring of party interest and institutional function has been the root cause of almost every failure of governance in the past three decades.

The cabinet that will attempt to implement all of this is itself a statement of intent. Ten of fifteen ministers are under 40. Sasmita Pokharel, who turns 30 this year, runs the education ministry. Sudan Gurung, 38, who rose to national attention during the Gen Z protests of 2025, is home minister. Swarnim Wagle, the finance minister and the oldest at 51, is an economist of genuine distinction who has spent years arguing for exactly the structural reforms the government is now attempting. Nisha Mehta at health, Sobita Gautam at law, Pratibha Rawal at general administration represent a generation of professionals who built their credentials outside the party system and who have now been asked to reform the state that the party system built.

The Lamichhane question also hangs in the air, as it must. Rabi Lamichhane, the RSP chairman who remains Mr Shah’s formal party superior, faces serious allegations of fraud and money laundering. Their alliance was, in the phrase of one Tribhuvan University political scientist, a marriage of convenience. Marriages of convenience tend to become inconvenient at the worst possible moments, and Mr Shah will need to manage that relationship without allowing it to stain a government that has staked everything on probity. It is the one vulnerability in an otherwise unusually strong position, and his critics are right to watch it carefully.

But critics watching that vulnerability would do well to keep the wider picture in frame. Nepal has had 32 governments since 1990 and not one of them completed a full term. It has cycled through prime ministers with a regularity that made serious policy impossible and made the word reform, in Nepali political discourse, almost meaningless from overuse. What Mr Shah has done in three weeks is not merely announce reforms. He has arrested a former prime minister, sacked a minister for nepotism within days of appointment, published a public scorecard against which his own government will be judged, and filled every significant portfolio with someone who appears to have been chosen because they know their subject rather than because they know the right people. He released a rap song the night before his inauguration that asked, simply, to see Nepal smiling. He is now the one responsible for making that happen. The 30 million people who voted for him, marched for him, sang his songs and held their breath through the counting of ballots, are not going to let him forget it.