Balendra “Balen” Shah
After the Rastriya Swatantra Party’s decisive victory in the March elections, Shah became prime minister with a near two-thirds parliamentary majority, an unusually compact Cabinet and an extraordinary reserve of public goodwill. His government was the direct political product of the Gen-Z protests of September 2025, when anger over corruption, unemployment, administrative paralysis and the ritual recycling of Nepal’s political elite finally broke through the exhausted structures of the old order.
The promise was simple. Patronage would be dismantled. Bureaucracy would be disciplined. Public services would be digitalised. Appointments would be based on merit. Corruption would cease to be the informal operating system of the state.
One hundred days later, Shah has unquestionably changed Nepal’s political atmosphere. Whether he has changed the state is another matter.
The first Cabinet meeting approved a one-hundred-point governance programme covering bureaucratic rationalisation, reform of public institutions, digital services, implementation of the commission investigating the violence during the Gen-Z protests and merit-based appointments throughout the civil service. The fifteen-member Cabinet itself was presented as evidence of a new political culture: no oversized ministries created to satisfy coalition partners, no endless bargaining over portfolios, no government held hostage by every minor party with three seats and a ministerial appetite.
The contrast with Nepal’s recent past could hardly have been sharper. Shah did not need to spend his first months purchasing parliamentary survival. He already possessed the numbers. His challenge was therefore more serious: to prove that political stability could be converted into institutional reform.
The results have so far been mixed.
There have been improvements in passport services, driving licences, public grievance systems and some forms of digital administration. Selected government offices have extended their operating hours. Procedures have been accelerated. Citizens have occasionally encountered a state less determined to punish them for requiring a document.
But these are administrative improvements, not yet structural transformation. Reducing the number of ministries, restructuring public enterprises and depoliticising the civil service require laws, institutional redesign and confrontation with networks that have survived every previous government. Much of the reform agenda remains in the realm of declarations, committees and pilot projects.
The government has changed the pace of administration more quickly than it has changed its foundations.
Its most visible achievement has been the anti-corruption campaign. Former prime minister K.P. Sharma Oli and former home minister Ramesh Lekhak were arrested in connection with culpable homicide allegations arising from the suppression of the September protests. Investigations were launched against former ministers, politicians and business figures over corruption, money laundering and abuse of office. Major procurement decisions, including the controversial electronic passport contract, were reopened for scrutiny.
The message was unmistakable. The old political class was no longer untouchable.
For a country where corruption investigations have often functioned as political theatre, the symbolism was powerful. Shah appeared willing to confront figures whom previous governments had protected through coalition agreements, party influence and mutual guarantees of impunity.
Yet the subsequent release of Oli, Lekhak and former energy minister Deepak Khadka by the courts exposed the central weakness of Shah’s method. An anti-corruption campaign can lose legitimacy when executive urgency moves faster than evidence and judicial process. The question is not whether former leaders should be investigated. They should. The question is whether the government is strengthening institutions or replacing them with the authority of the prime minister’s office.
This is the contradiction now defining the Shah administration.
The government came to power denouncing the arbitrary use of state institutions by traditional parties. It now risks treating constitutional procedures as obstacles to reform. Ordinances have increasingly substituted for parliamentary deliberation. Decision-making has become concentrated within the prime minister’s office. Independent institutions have faced pressure in politically sensitive investigations.
The defence is always the same: Nepal cannot wait.
The country has heard versions of that argument before. Every centralising government explains that institutions are too slow, Parliament too obstructive, courts too formalistic and constitutional limitations too inconvenient. Administrative impatience is presented as patriotism. Power is concentrated temporarily in order to save democracy from its own inefficiency.
Temporary concentration of power, however, has a habit of becoming permanent.
Shah’s relationship with Parliament has sharpened these concerns. Opposition legislators repeatedly obstructed proceedings after he declined to respond personally to debates on the government’s annual programme. The Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML accused him of avoiding scrutiny despite commanding a large majority.
Their criticism is not entirely disinterested. Nepal’s traditional parties, suddenly excluded from power, have discovered constitutional accountability with admirable speed. Nevertheless, the argument remains valid. Electoral legitimacy is not a substitute for parliamentary responsibility. A two-thirds majority does not make scrutiny unnecessary. It makes avoidance of scrutiny less defensible.
The government has also discovered that anti-corruption standards are more difficult to maintain once applied internally. Labour Minister Deepak Sah resigned after allegations that he used his position to help his wife remain on the Health Insurance Board. Home Minister Sudan Gurung came under scrutiny over alleged links to a businessman investigated for money laundering.
Sah’s resignation was important. It demonstrated a willingness to impose consequences within the ruling party rather than reserving accountability for political enemies. But the controversies also revealed the obvious: the RSP is not composed of a new species of human being. It is a political organisation operating inside the same state, economy and networks it promised to reform.
Its credibility will depend not on claiming moral purity, but on responding consistently when its own leaders fail.
The same applies to the investigation into allegations that party membership was issued to people under eighteen. The matter may prove minor or unfounded, but the intervention of the National Human Rights Commission is politically significant. The RSP demanded scrutiny of everyone else. It must now accept scrutiny of itself without describing oversight as sabotage.
Shah’s most radical proposal may ultimately be constitutional rather than administrative. The RSP has endorsed the abolition of Nepal’s provincial governments, arguing that federalism has created duplication, unnecessary expenditure and overlapping bureaucracies without delivering better governance.
The criticism resonates because Nepal’s federal structure has often appeared expensive, confused and politically colonised by the same parties controlling the centre. Provincial institutions have frequently operated less as engines of local democracy than as additional distribution points for patronage.
But abolishing them would reopen one of the most sensitive settlements of the post-conflict order. Federalism was not introduced merely as an administrative experiment. It was a response, however imperfect, to demands for representation, regional autonomy and inclusion. Dismantling the provinces in the name of efficiency could strengthen central administration while weakening the political accommodation on which the 2015 Constitution was built.
A leaner state is not automatically a more democratic one.
In foreign policy, Shah has so far preferred caution. Relations with India and China have continued without dramatic realignment. The difference has been stylistic and institutional. Unlike previous communist-led governments, the RSP has no ideological or party-to-party relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. Its engagement with Beijing has therefore remained predominantly state-based.
This explains the government’s cautious treatment of the Belt and Road Initiative. Nepal has reaffirmed cooperation with China without approving major new projects, accelerating inherited schemes or openly rejecting the BRI. The omission of the initiative from Kathmandu’s account of the foreign minister’s Beijing visit suggested distance without confrontation.
With India, the government has adopted a somewhat more assertive tone while preserving cooperation on trade, infrastructure, energy and security. Shah appears less interested in the ritualised personal diplomacy that has often characterised Nepal’s relations with New Delhi. But style has not yet produced a strategic rupture.
This may be the wisest element of his first hundred days. Nepal does not require another government using India and China as instruments in domestic political competition. It requires the ability to deal with both without allowing either relationship to become a substitute for policy.
Shah’s government represents a genuine break with Nepal’s recent political culture. It derives its legitimacy not from the civil war, the democracy movements or the arithmetic of coalition politics, but from performance, anti-corruption and the anger of a younger generation that sees the established parties as a closed cartel.
That is its strength. It may also become its weakness.
Performance-based legitimacy creates impatience with process. When voters demand immediate results, constitutional restraints can appear wasteful. When the leader is popular, institutions can appear less necessary. When reform is identified too closely with one individual, criticism can be portrayed as resistance by the corrupt old order.
Balen Shah has changed the language of Nepali politics. He has demonstrated urgency, coherence and a willingness to confront interests that once seemed immovable. But his first hundred days have altered expectations more than institutions.
The decisive question is no longer whether Nepal needs reform. It is whether reform will be conducted through the rule of law or through the authority of a government convinced that its good intentions justify procedural shortcuts.
The old political class damaged Nepal through patronage, paralysis and corruption. The new political class must not damage it by deciding that institutions are expendable because it governs faster without them.
Shah’s revolution will succeed only if it builds a state stronger than its prime minister.
