Global Courant 2023-05-12 17:11:42
KATHMANDU, Nepal — Before he aspired to the highest office of Kathmandu, Balendra Shah appeared on the rooftops of the city, a singer competing in rap battles or filming music videos.
His songs, which focused on poverty, underdevelopment and the rot he saw at the root of Nepal’s entrenched political culture, drew an avid following among the country’s youth.
A song, “Balidan‘, which means ‘sacrifice’ in Nepali, has been viewed seven million times on YouTube.
People who are supposed to protect the country are idiots
Leaders are all thieves who plunder the land
“There’s a diss culture in hip-hop music,” he said in a recent interview. “I used to disseminate politicians.”
Now he is one.
Balen, as he is known in Nepal, made an unlikely bid for mayor of Kathmandu, the capital of the Himalayan country, last May.
He campaigned for his popularity as a rapper while also capitalizing on his training and experience as a structural engineer, posing as a skilled professional rather than a professional politician.
On top of his signature black-on-black blazer and jeans, paired with small, square black sunglasses, he appeared on the campaign trail draped in the flag of Nepal. A complaint to the country’s election commission that he disrespected the flag only served to further uproar his campaign.
A political novice, Balen, who just turned 33, ran as an independent – rejecting an alliance with one of the national political parties that have dominated elections and traded power for years.
He won in a landslide, defeating his two rivals, both major party candidates.
Political commentators say Balen’s dismay has inspired a wave of young independent candidates across Nepal — including an e-commerce entrepreneur, a doctor, an airline pilot and another hip-hop artist — to take on a political class considered corrupt and incompetent. dominated by men in their late 60s and 70s who have been in office for decades.
Like Balen, these young candidates pledged to do something about the chronic underdevelopment of Nepal’s economy, which sends hundreds of thousands of working-age people abroad every year. As Balen rapped in “Balidan”:
As we sell our identity abroad, government employees are paid 30,000 and have properties in 30 different places
Who will pay the debt of people who work seven seas away?
Hundreds competed for seats in Nepal’s parliament in November elections, with a group of young professionals quickly founding a new political party just before the election; it finished as the fourth largest in parliament.
Analysts called it the Balen effect.
“It’s a kind of revolution against the politicians,” said Bhim Upadhyaya, former government secretary, Nepal’s top bureaucrat and an early adviser to Balen’s campaign.
Balen’s electoral success “really influenced a lot of young people,” said Toshima Karki, a 33-year-old doctor who was one of the new winners of a seat in parliament.
This sudden influx of youth into Nepalese politics may not yet translate into meaningful changes, and a year into his mayoralty, Balen himself has received mixed reviews. Some complain that he showed more sympathy for the poor as an artist than as a politician.
The country’s seemingly unmanageable political instability hasn’t made it any easier to tackle devastating unemployment, or to carry out the basic work of government – plugging potholes, supplying drinking water, equipping public schools.
Yet it was this unsexy physical work of municipal government that Balen said inspired him to run for office.
Balen, the son of an Ayurvedic doctor and a housewife, said he found artistic inspiration on bus rides home from school, observing the poverty on the streets of Kathmandu that contrasted with his own comfortable upbringing.
Initially he wrote poetry. But after high speed internet reached Nepal and he discovered Tupac and 50 Cent on YouTube, he started writing rap lyrics.
While American rappers inspired his music, his fashion sense was his own. In his first big rap battle, in 2013, he looked more like a bard, wearing a black vest over a white shirt with wide sleeves.
That rap battle established Balen as an underground idol, and he gained a following of young people in Nepal and in the diaspora with a series of hits that mix classical Nepali music with modern beats.
But instead of making music full-time, he also decided to pursue another passion and completed a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in Kathmandu and then a master’s degree in construction engineering in India.
Going into politics was always part of his plan, he said.
When an earthquake hit Kathmandu in 2015, claiming 8,702 lives and causing about $3.8 billion in damage, Balen was working as a civil engineer. Together with his colleagues, he worked on the reconstruction of 2,500 homes.
The experience deepened his determination to enter politics. In his mayoral campaign, he promised simple but – for Kathmandu – elusive goals: clean water, better roads, reliable electricity and better sewage management.
Since taking office, his government has opened local health clinics and funded secondary schools to expand vocational training and provide free menstrual products.
However, many plans have yet to be implemented.
As mayor, he has particularly spoken out about the lack of drinking water in Kathmandu, one of the rainiest capitals in the world, where most people depend on water supplies. He describes the inequality as a “man-made disaster” caused by rapid development that is impervious to the city’s ancient water spouts, which about 20 percent of the population depends on itbegan to dry out as the valley’s wetlands were paved over.
Nearly a year into his first term, “there is still no concrete result” in restoring the spouts, the mayor’s secretary Bhoop Dev Shah acknowledged.
What Balen has succeeded in – but not without controversy – is demolishing illegal buildings, both commercial and residential, built without proper permits.
As mayor, Balen searches large parts of the city every day to assess the status of his engineering projects. While he rarely gives interviews, he recently invited a New York Times reporter team to join him on one of these tours, and defended his methods.
“In Kathmandu, there is no proper planning,” Balen said from the back seat of the black SUV in which he travels around the city. ‘We can say that a city is developed when there are parks. Now Kathmandu is a concrete jungle.”
He is confident that he can solve this. “The only structural engineer we have in Kathmandu Municipal Corporation is the mayor,” Balen said of himself. “That way it’s technically easy for me to carry out our plans, and I can do it my way.”
Not everyone agrees with his approach, which has eased Kathmandu’s notoriously heavy traffic, but has also attracted criticism that the projects have hurt the poor – especially his steps to rid the busy streets, parking lots and sidewalks of cart tractors, itinerant vendors and the slums of squatters.
“Using the police and removing the people without giving alternatives is not the way to go,” said his former adviser, Mr Upadhyaya. He added: “It’s inhumane.”
During the recent inspection tour, the mayor’s convoy navigated to a group of apartment buildings around a partially excavated road and an open sewer. Here the mayor had chosen to clear some apartment buildings in order to build a road wide enough for vehicular traffic.
Sahin Wakar, 40, and her husband live in a house that was partially destroyed by a demolition crew commissioned by the mayor’s office.
“We accept it if it’s for improvement,” she said.
The mayor was also sure that the disruption was worth it.
“To build something great,” he said, “we have to clear the site.”
