Considerable ink has been spilt (and screen time spent) on Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s maiden address to the UN General Assembly late last month. While Shah’s delivery itself was rather wooden, there appears to be general consensus that the content of his speech was something to write home about. There have been many dissections of his speech, ranging from the fawning to the somewhat critical, but I have yet to come across any that lambasted the prime minister for making a fool of himself.

Given our young prime minister’s somewhat rightist proclivities—as can be gleaned even from his rather sparse public articulations—it was to be expected that comparisons would be made with King Mahendra’s speech to the same body in 1967. Besides the fact that both Shahs spoke to an audience from behind opaque pairs of dark glasses in a pointed departure from decorum on such a stage, some measure of curiosity about these two leaders of Nepal was but natural.

Mahendra was the absolute ruler of a country still perceived as a Shangri-La. Due to his background as a rapper, Prime Minister Shah has been an object of similar fascination since his shock victory to Kathmandu’s mayorship. And his still-ambiguous role during last year’s Gen Z movement and rapid rise to head of government has further fuelled the mystique. For no matter how hard his acolytes try and impress upon others that he is also a qualified engineer, what propelled Shah to fame and power was not his engineering prowess but the ability of his lyrics to strike a chord among those who felt left behind. 

After Shah’s speech this year, attention was also drawn to the fact that everyone in the hall stood up as Mahendra was ushered in, leading to nonsensical chatter about how Nepal was once regarded so highly on the international stage. Those were the days when everyone in the house rose for every head of state or government, a practice later discarded when the universal show of respect began to degenerate into partisanship as countries pointedly refused to extend that courtesy to rivals.

The insinuation appeared to be that Shah has once again raised Nepal’s stature. His fandom hailed him as a once-in-a-generation leader. There were those who went to ridiculous lengths to prove that, with AI-generated and obviously fake videos and images circulated showing him in an armed cavalcade through the streets of New York or escorted by a phalanx of the city’s finest. Even the real ones showing a bunch of Nepalis cheering Shah as he left his hotel were presented as evidence of his global appeal. And then some marvelled at Shah’s delivery in English—and supposedly extempore to boot.

The fact of the matter is Shah’s speech did not create the kind of waves it should have. Besides his own persona and the fact that he was the youngest head of state or government at the GA this year, Nepal had just suffered from a terrible disaster that scientists are saying should serve as a wake-up call to humanity. Despite making some very valid points calling on more concerted action internationally, Shah’s speech received barely any traction. (For instance, the title of an article in The New York Times instead asked, ‘Why Did Nepal’s Leader Wear Sunglasses at the U.N. General Assembly?’, devoting a sum total of just one sentence on the content itself.)

That was not Shah’s fault and has more to do with Nepal’s place in the world. Like his predecessors, Shah spoke to a hall that was largely empty since there is little Nepal can say or do to shape the international order. It did not help either that he was the 17th speaker in the afternoon of the third day of the General Assembly. Even the devastation Nepal had just undergone was not enough to make the delegates stick around to hear what Shah had to say. We are just too low on the global pecking order to be of interest to anyone.

The question to ask is: What did Shah hope to achieve at the UN? The haste with which he scooted back to Nepal after his address made it look like the whole point was to inform his domestic audience that he had done his part and that’s that. Surely, he and his advisers would have known that one speech at the UN counts for very little. Nepal may have just suffered from an unheard-of phenomenon that everyone could watch on their phones. But dramatic footage counts for little in an imperfect world where large parts grapple with problems of their own, some of which are indeed ecological, but others are political, social, or economic.

The hard part of actually translating words to action takes patient diplomacy and coalition-building across a range of issues. And that is where Prime Minister Shah has come far, far short. Had he stayed on in New York, Nepal’s suffering (not to mention the intrigue he arouses in some quarters) would have opened the doors to many bilateral meetings where he could have earnestly pursued the proposal he had made during his UNGA address. It could have resulted in some momentum being built up that Nepal could have led all the way. Instead, it was an opportunity lost, and the only explanation I can think of is that our prime minister is more than a tad shy.

It is not uncommon for performers to be introverts by nature and Shah appears to be of the same mould. But there are very few performers who are also politicians. As the country’s chief executive, his natural reticence cannot serve as an excuse for Shah’s reluctance to deal at a personal level with leaders of other countries. Not especially since the glorious future for Nepal that he and his party have envisioned involves greater engagement internationally, not less.

The example of Narendra Modi during his tenure as chief minister of Gujarat is instructive. As The Economist tells it, he had won by a landslide the state elections held after the communal riots of 2002, but attending a meeting of industrialists, he realised they viewed both him and Gujarat as pariahs. Deciding a rebranding was necessary, he had his staff draw up a list of names to be invited to an investors’ summit. As his top bureaucrat recalled, Modi began going through the list and at 50 calls a day, he had talked to everyone within 10 days. And when the summit happened, where they had expected 800 people, 1200 showed up and pledged investments worth $14 billion, heralding the birth of the ‘Gujarat Model’, which eventually paved the path for Modi’s route to New Delhi.

I am no fan of Modi’s, but could not help but be impressed by his single-minded focus on getting things done. What do we have in Nepal instead? Far from that kind of action, our reclusive prime minister calls a meeting of ruling party engineer-MPs, where he holds forth to inform them that engineers are ‘extraordinary’ people compared to other MPs and urges them to come up with ideas. While the obvious fallacy of applying technocratic solutions alone to all of Nepal’s problems is itself problematic, the emergence of what appears to be a putative ‘Balen Thought’ appears indicative of our prime minister believing in his omniscience. A domestically successful UN foray seems to have resulted in what is known as the ‘halo effect’, whereby competence in one area convinces someone of their expertise in everything. Remember KP Sharma Oli, anyone?