As Balendra Shah prepares to become the next Prime Minister of Nepal, an old video of the rapper-turned-politician dancing to hip beats has resurfaced. In the viral clip, Shah dances to “Ampun Ketua”, an energetic track that has become a “power anthem” on TikTok and Instagram.
Ampun Ketua is often used in social media challenges to show someone who is “winning” or who is in charge, but does so with a bit of swagger.
The future prime minister of Nepal, who built his career on “Nephop” (Nepali hip-hop), dancing to a song that roughly translates to “Forgive me, leader” or “Mercy, boss” is exactly the kind of playful “Gen Z” political branding that propelled him to victory.
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For Balen Shah, it is a nod to his supporters who see him as the “New Leader” taking over from the old guard.
Gen-Z of Nepal shared this video widely with captions like, “How everyone in Nepal woke up this morning”, “Nepal’s Gen-Z PM proves you can be a leader, engineer and rapper at the same time” and more.
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RSP has scored a landslide victory in Nepal’s elections
The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), a three-year-old party, won Nepal’s general election by a landslide, officials said. This made his candidate Balendra Shah the next prime minister with a mandate for the rapper-turned-politician to restore political stability.
The March 5 election was the Himalayan nation’s first vote since anti-corruption demonstrations in September last year led by Gen Z protesters killed 77 people and toppled the government.
The RSP won 182 seats in the 275-member parliament, the electoral commission said on Thursday, the biggest majority of any party in more than six decades. They won 125 directly elected mandates and 57 through proportional representation votes.
The Nepali Congress Party came second with 38 seats.
The 35-year-old RSP prime ministerial candidate defeated four-time former prime minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, chairman of Nepal’s senior party CPN-UML, by a huge margin of nearly 50,000 votes in Jhapa-5 constituency.
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Who is Balendra Shah?
Balendra Shah who is popularly known as Balen is set to become the new Prime Minister of Nepal. His political journey began as the mayor of Kathmandu.
Born in 1990, Balen Shah hails from a Madhesi family originally from Maithil. He received his Bachelor of Science (BE) degree in Civil Engineering from Himalayan Whitehouse International College. He then went to Visvesvaraya University of Technology, Karnataka to pursue his M.Tech. degree in civil engineering.
Shah was interested in music since childhood. He turned it into a career by releasing his first single Sadak Balak in 2012 – a song he wrote in ninth grade.
Before entering politics, Balen Shah was a popular name in the Nepali underground hip-hop scene as a rapper and lyricist and was known for his songs that raised issues of corruption and inequality in Nepal.
In 2022, he created history by contesting the Kathmandu mayoral election as an independent candidate and won with a huge margin of over 61,000 votes, defeating seasoned politicians from established parties.
