Balen Shah: the rapper who is the new prime minister of Nepal | World news

Today, Balen, 35, is at the center of the same system he once despised. He has said in his interviews that he wants to try to change it from within after challenging the status quo. Lead a political movement aligning with the Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP), which won a landslide victory in Nepal’s general election in the first election since Generation Z protests brought down the government. The protests had escalated into rampant riots and arson incidents that left 70 dead and forced the resignation of four-time Communist Party Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli.

Balen, who often wears his trademark black rectangular sunglasses and has become known in Nepal as a “disruptor”, defeated Oli from the Jhapa 5 constituency in eastern Nepal by 50,000 votes. He will now be the new Prime Minister of Nepal and will be the youngest to hold the position.

The underground rapper, in fact, has emerged as one of the most unusual political stories of recent times. Balen, who comes from the Madhesi community (from southern Nepal bordering India from Bihar) and also speaks Maithili, a language commonly spoken in Bihar and Jharkhand, is the son of a housewife and an Ayurvedic doctor. Since he was a child he was interested in music, but he was always fascinated by writing poetry. He has talked about how, on the way to school, he felt distressed by the poverty he saw, weighing it against his own sheltered life. When broadband internet came to Nepal, he gained access to the world of hip hop and was deeply inspired by the unfiltered storytelling of popular American rappers 50 Cent and Tupac Shakur, especially the latter’s songs about poverty and inequality.

In 2013, he was part of a local rap battle (a space where rappers compete through improvised verses and sharp wordplay) that made him a star of the Nepali underground hip hop scene. He won double. But making music full time wasn’t going to be easy or enough to survive. So Balen also pursued a professional career. He finished his civil engineering degree in Kathmandu and was working as such when a deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit Nepal in 2015. It claimed nearly 1,900 lives. Balen and his colleagues worked on the reconstruction of many houses. He then pursued a master’s degree in structural engineering from Bengaluru.

In parallel, he also remained a musician and activist, important to Nepal’s cultural space and not directly to its politics. But that change came in 2022, when Balen decided to run for mayor of Kathmandu as an independent candidate. Here was a political novice trying to put himself in a space where he could fight corruption and government inefficiency. Curiously, resentment was already ingrained in his music. The message resonated with voters. At age 32, Balen became mayor of Kathmandu, defeating candidates from both the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) and the Nepali Congress.

Last year in February, he released Nepal Haseko (Nepal Smiles), a song about a hopeful future in Nepal. The song that came with more than a million views said: I want to see Nepal smile; I want to see Nepalis living happily. In September 2025, when Nepal was rocked by Generation Z protests, which began after an internet ban, the song was reborn and elevated to anthem status. It even found a Gen Z remix and, in the run-up to the election, was played at rallies and on their tours. Balen also often danced on the hood of his car at rallies.

It is interesting how Balen’s criticism of the system and his discontent through his musical verses made him an important symbol of dissent. I was demanding a change. He even vented his anger against nations with close ties to Nepal, including India. Everything was shared on social media and bad words were used. Balen has 35 lakh followers on Facebook.

At a recent rally before the election, Balen, dressed in a black suit and a black Nepalese dhaka topi, took off his now-called “Balen Shah glasses,” looked at those gathered and said, “I love you.” People loved him too. The rapper who decided to be a politician is about to be the new Prime Minister of Nepal.