PM designate Balen Shah hopes to take along both India and China as partners
By T N Ashok
For decades, Nepal’s politics functioned like a wheel that never stopped spinning. Governments rose and collapsed. Coalitions formed and fractured. The same surnames recycled through the same ministries. Voters grew cynical, the young grew restless, and the country’s most ambitious citizens quietly packed their bags and left — for the Gulf, for Malaysia, for anywhere that offered a future. That wheel has now broken.
The Rastriya Swatantra Party — the RSP, a movement barely four years old — has done what political analysts long considered impossible in Nepal: it has shattered the establishment. In the most consequential election since the abolition of the monarchy in 2008, the RSP surged from obscurity to dominance, defeating veteran politicians including former Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, one of the most experienced communist leaders in the region. Nepal is not merely changing governments. It is changing eras.
The RSP was founded in 2022 by Rabi Lamichhane, a television journalist who spent years holding Nepal’s ruling class to account on camera. His founding premise was simple and radical: that competence, not ideology, should determine who governs. In a country whose post-monarchy politics had been dominated by Maoists, communists, and Congress centrists — all of them shaped by 20th-century revolutionary movements — that premise landed like a thunderclap.
The party’s other standard-bearer, Balendra ‘Balen’ Shah — civil engineer, rapper, and former Mayor of Kathmandu — embodied a different kind of political authority: urban, educated, fluent in social media, untouched by the corruption that had seeped into every corner of the old order. Together, Lamichhane and Shah drew around them a remarkable cohort: youth activist Sudan Gurung, who helped organize the 2025 Gen-Z protests that rocked the country, and filmmaker-politician Asim Shah, whose background reflects a generation shaped by screens rather than street barricades.
Their ascent was accelerated by the protests of 2025, when Nepal’s young, connected, and economically frustrated population took to the streets over corruption, stagnant wages, and a tone-deaf government that had banned social media. The government backed down. The RSP surged. Young voters who had never engaged with formal politics found in the RSP something they had stopped expecting from their leaders: a direct answer to the question of why their country wasn’t working.
To appreciate the magnitude of the shift, one must reckon with what the RSP displaced. Since the monarchy’s fall, Nepal had oscillated between the Nepali Congress — a centrist party historically associated with anti-monarchist democracy — and two competing strands of the communist left: the UML under Oli and the Maoist Centre under Pushpa Kamal Dahal, who had led a decade-long insurgency before entering electoral politics. These were not lightweight adversaries. They had written the 2015 constitution. They had steered Nepal through some of the most turbulent transitions in modern South Asian history.
But they had also presided over something harder to forgive: stagnation. Nepal’s economy remained heavily dependent on remittances sent home by the millions of young men and women who had emigrated in search of opportunity. Corruption was endemic and visible. Infrastructure lagged. The gap between political promise and lived reality had grown so wide that an entire generation had simply stopped believing.
The RSP’s manifesto answered this frustration with arithmetic: 1.2 million new jobs, doubled per-capita income, expanded digital governance, ambitious infrastructure programs. Whether these targets are achievable is a separate question. What matters politically is that they were offered — and believed.
Nepal’s new leaders inherit more than a domestic crisis. They inherit one of the most delicate geopolitical positions on earth. Landlocked between India to the south and China to the north, Nepal has spent the post-monarchy years attempting to balance two rising civilisational powers with competing visions for the region. Under the old governments, this balancing act was largely reactive — a scramble to avoid offending either neighbour while accepting investment from both.
The RSP has hinted at something more ambitious: reframing Nepal not as a buffer state — a small country whose main strategic virtue is that it doesn’t belong to either giant — but as a bridge. The distinction is consequential. A buffer exists to be managed. A bridge is built to create value. Nepal sits atop some of the world’s most underutilized hydroelectric potential, commands key Himalayan transit corridors, and occupies the geographic center of an emerging connectivity arc linking South and East Asia.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has already brought investment in roads, tunnels, and rail feasibility studies. India remains Nepal’s largest trading partner and the indispensable route to the sea. The RSP’s challenge — and potential historic achievement — would be to extract maximum benefit from both without becoming a pawn of either. Early signals suggest the new government will pursue a pragmatic rather than ideological foreign policy, which both Beijing and New Delhi will study carefully.
If there is a single policy arena where Nepal’s new government could genuinely transform the country’s fortunes, it is energy. Nepal’s rivers, fed by Himalayan glaciers, possess hydroelectric potential that dwarfs the country’s current installed capacity — and far exceeds its domestic needs. For years, this potential sat largely untapped, the victim of regulatory uncertainty, political instability, and the reluctance of foreign investors to commit capital to a country where governments changed faster than project licenses could be processed.
A stable RSP government with a mandate for economic transformation could change the calculus. India is facing a severe power deficit in its northern and eastern states. Bangladesh has signed preliminary electricity import agreements. If Nepal can unlock even a fraction of its hydroelectric capacity and build the cross-border transmission infrastructure to export it, the economic return would be transformative — not merely additional revenue, but a structural shift from remittance dependence to energy exportation. Nepal would become, in the parlance of development economists, a net exporter of prosperity rather than labour.
History is littered with movements that won elections and foundered on governance. The RSP’s leaders are charismatic and their mandate is genuine — but they are also largely untested at the national level. Managing a coalition government in Kathmandu, where parliamentary arithmetic requires perpetual negotiation, is a different discipline than leading protests or running a municipality. The party faces the classic trap of populist insurgencies: expectations have been raised so high that any shortfall risks being experienced as betrayal.
There is also the monarchy question — an unexpected wrinkle in an already complex political fabric. Since the monarchy’s abolition in 2008, nostalgia for the former royal family has quietly persisted in certain segments of Nepali society, particularly among older, rural, and more conservative voters. Some RSP supporters have floated the idea of restoring the monarchy in a ceremonial constitutional role. The RSP has not formally endorsed this, and prudently so — reopening the monarchical question would consume political oxygen that the new government desperately needs for economic reform. But the conversation will not disappear.
Most consequentially, Nepal’s leaders will have to navigate the India-China relationship at a moment of heightened regional tension. Both powers will press their claims. Both will offer inducements and apply pressure. The RSP’s ‘bridge not buffer’ doctrine is elegant in theory; sustaining it under sustained geopolitical stress will require a diplomatic sophistication that the party has not yet been tested on.
Nepal’s political revolution carries meaning that extends beyond the Himalayas. It is one of the cleaner examples in recent years of a democratic electorate doing what democratic electorates are supposed to do: punishing failure and rewarding a credible alternative, without resorting to authoritarian shortcuts. The RSP did not ride to power on ethnic grievance or nationalist fury. It rode to power on the demand for competence.
That demand — expressed most loudly by a generation raised on smartphones, aware of the gap between what their country is and what it could be — is not unique to Nepal. It echoes from Lagos to Lima, from Tbilisi to Taipei. The question everywhere is the same: can democratic institutions produce governments that actually govern? Nepal, in this election, has bet that they can.
Whether the RSP delivers will be watched closely, not just by its neighbours but by anyone asking what a functional democracy in a poor country looks like in the third decade of the 21st century. For a small landlocked nation that the world has long overlooked, that is an unexpectedly significant stage. The Himalayan republic has found itself, for perhaps the first time, at the center of a story the world needs to hear. (IPA Service)
