There is a National Debate Championship going on in Nepal. The resolution: is Prime Minister Balendra Shah’s government is doing a good job or not? Nearly two months after assuming office, supporters think he is off to a flying start, and others that he has an authoritarian streak.

For the sake of this country’s stability, this debate needs a rapid resolution. Toxic trolling has polarised the polity and society to the point of paralysis. Healthy debate is impossible.

What does the pro-prime minister team support, and what do his critics oppose:

Affirmative Team: In favour of the resolution.

Nepalis fed up with the last decades of mismanagement, partisanship and corruption voted en masse for the RSP mainly because Balendra Shah was its prime ministerial candidate. We had endured serial prime ministers who headed rotational coalitions and ran the country to the ground till the breaking point on 8-9 September.

The March election turned this anger into votes. Nepalis felt that change, any change, was better than the status quo. Even though at least 5 million young Nepalis abroad could not exercise their franchise, they swayed the ballot.

As prime minister Balendra Shah hit the ground running. He arrested his predecessor, sacked two tainted ministers, removed 1,500 party-appointed officials, abolished unions in education, got himself a chief justice, sent bulldozers to raze squatter settlements to the ground.

Balenistas cheered the prime minister on. If he had waited for Parliament to debate bills ad nauseam, it would have taken months. The only way to deal with the real estate mafia and their political protectors was to physically remove them.

So what if he did not meet Donald Trump’s emissary and envoys from China and India? He is demonstrating that Nepal is no longer a buffer state and not kowtowing to bullies anymore.

Balendra Shah is a man of few words. He walks the talk. His predecessor K P Oli talked a lot and was too clever by half, and no one could understand what Sher Bahadur Deuba was saying. Action speaks louder than words.

By posting a photo of himself nibbling yak cheese from the DDC, the prime minister was promoting a state-owned corporation that was not able to pay dairy farmers because of politicisation, mismanagement and corruption.

Prime Minister Balendra Shah was elected to shake things up, and he is doing just that. His choice of wardrobe, shades, shoes shows he is disruptor-in-chief out to set off a seismic rupture in Nepal’s socio-political landscape.

Negative Team: Against the motion.

Balendra Shah still thinks he is rapper Balen. He got away with misogynistic lyrics and being radically anti-establishment, but he is the establishment now. He is not just the Mayor of Kathmandu, he heads the government of Nepal. By bulldozing riverside settlements he is making the landless homeless. He is continuing what he started out as mayor to evict shantytown dwellers, chasing down and beating street side vendors. 

The prime minister’s actions do indeed speak louder than his words. Such anti-poor atrocities are an antithesis to the very songs he rapped about. If the land mafia was involved, he should have gone after them — not the poor families eking out a living on the edge of society.

He removed party-affiliated officials, only to replace them with untested cronies, exactly the behaviour the RSP said it would eradicate. He suspended Parliament to ram through ordinances just so he could get his man in as chief justice. He has never addressed the House, and haughtily walks out while the president is reading his government’s address.

Avoiding foreign emissaries is not nationalism, it is destructive arrogance that the poorest country in Asia cannot ill afford. He shows disrespect for national institutions by wearing sports shoes to Parliament and hiding unsmilingly behind shades. Posting social media memes of himself with yak cheese is cute and may have got millions of likes, but does not solve the structural problems of the DDC and other corrupt corporations.

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Judges in a debating championship would adjudicate the two teams on: a) the strength of their arguments, b) its delivery and persuasiveness, c) engagement with opponents in the the rebuttal round. It will be up to us citizens who will have to judge.

Mass media and social media amplify the gulf between the two sides and feed the beast through partisan content and clickbait. In the national interest, the old and new have to shed their egos and and agree to disagree. Otherwise there will be no winner in this debate.