After Prime Minister Balendra Shah's office detained a government secretary for messaging him to be made ambassador, Nepal’s cybersphere ended up arguing about a joke. Not the arrest.
Secretary Krishnahari Pushkar is detained by police in Teku for nine hours on Saturday, until he walks out on bail at 10pm. The prime minister logs on at 10:15 with a mocking nocturnal post.
Education Minister and government spokesperson Sashmit Pokharel and others joined in with similar sarcasm. The UML's Mahesh Basnet took the bait, and prescribed psychological counselling for the prime minister, sounding exactly like the humourless uncle he is. But by the next day, Pushkar’s arrest was forgotten. The debate has shifted to whether the prime minister is allowed to be funny.
The content on Nepal’s ‘antisocial media’ comes in three genres:
A meme has a template. The frame stays fixed while anyone can swap in context, which is why it spreads without permission.
A troll has a target. It exists to provoke or humiliate a specific person, a craft the PMO knows from the inside since chief adviser Kumar Ben once ran a troll page.
A shitpost has neither template nor target. It is crude on purpose, low-effort, absurd, and its main political function is to derail whatever serious conversation was happening before it arrived.
The prime minister was shitposting. This is the digital equivalent of Gai Jatra, the Nepali festival that serves to vent society’s stress. Shitposts weaponise that pressure online. As an active shitposter since 2015, I appreciate this cathartic art form that turns absurdity into biting satire against systems we are conditioned to accept as normal.
NOT THEM
Balen Shah won Kathmandu mayorship in 2022 without a party, then swept 182 seats in 2026 without a cadre network. Both campaigns ran on one promise: we are not like them.
When 'not them' is the entire value proposition, every ritual of conventional politics rings hollow. Press conferences belong to the Oli era, budget question time is for collapsing coalitions. On budget night, at 9:54pm, while economists found a Rs130 billion hole in the consolidated fund, the prime minister’s two word online post read: 'Be confident.'
On Facebook, the BalenOfficial account is his loudspeaker. The 414 posts going back to his mayoral days shows that most were uploaded in daylight hours, and there is a median engagement of 133,601 likes per post — higher than most Nepali politicians manage in their entire career.
Then there is his alternate account itsb.itsb, the den. The 500 posts that include romanised Nepali, inside jokes have a median engagement of 3,600 likes. The Prime Minister of Nepal keeps a main and a finsta.
The ambassador joke went up on the alt and pulled 107,329 likes and 20,789 comments, this was 30 times the den's median likes and 151 times its median comments — the most engagement recorded in its scrapped history.
A Saturday-night throwaway comment on ambassadorship on the small account outdrew every official communication the government issued that month. And the choreography follows major controversies.
The prime minister’s AI-stylised self-portrait surfaced on the morning of 9 May, just as backlash against ordinances crested. The 'Say cheese’ post appeared on the loudspeaker while displaced women in state holding centres were protesting. It took 463,000 likes inside 24 hours, and now sits at 523,871 — four times the big page's own six-figure median. While DDC’s yak cheese sales jumped 30%, the plight of evicted squatters fell off the news radar.
The deflection worked, and the comment section proves it. Of 1,994 comments scraped from the ambassador thread, only 18 mention Pushkar, Teku or the word ‘secretary’. One in four comments carries a laughing emoji. The five most-liked comments hold 70% of every like in the thread, and all five are punchlines, led by the education minister's 'Message gardim?' at 7,400. (See charts)
Where the word police appears at all, it is comedy. 'Nai feri uthauna aaula police' sits at 5,700 likes. A commenter asking what morality allows a prime minister to expose a citizen's private message gets zero likes, buried by a sorting algorithm that needed no instruction from anyone.
A man spent nine hours in a police facility, and in the public record of the nation's response he survives as 1.5 comments per hundred.
This method now works as state communication, outperforming any press release. A ministry circular about the competitive ambassadorial process would have reached a few hundred bureaucrats. One shitpost made the whole country aware the process exists.
The ‘Say cheese’ post did more for a struggling state dairy in 24 hours than years of subsidy announcements, and the legacy press amplified it all for free. Balen speaks the language of guaranteed national distribution.
Second, the brand logic has produced clean appointments to state agencies, because hiring untainted professionals is also 'not them'. The cabinet stopped at 15 ministries when the Constitution allows 25.
A rapper named Balen mocked Singha Durbar for a decade, now he owns the building he once threatened to burn down. When the prime minister mocks a secretary his police arrested, the punchline deters anyone else thinking of asking him for a favour. Finance Minister Swarnim Wagle has picked up the same grammar, reportedly framing an austerity budget as designed to 'piss off the leftists'. Trump wrote this playbook.
Shah announced he would skip foreign travel in his first year and has refused to meet foreign envoys. Then, addressing Parliament for the firs time he said Nepal had also occupied Indian territory. RSP Chair Rabi Lamichhane and foreign Minister Shishir Khanal had to do damage control in Delhi.
Or maybe this is deliberate. The chairman charms, the PM growls, and Nepal extracts leverage. But if so, nobody briefed the diplomats. Delhi sent a message by giving Lamichhane a welcome warmer than the Delhi heatwave.
Foreign Minister Khanal flew to Delhi the same day Lamichhane returned, and now goes off to Beijing to balance things off. Twice in one month, the RSP has had to clean up the mess after the prime minister’s shitpost.
A brand needs consistency. Running a state takes conversation. But the prime minister’s trash posts point to a leader who would rather stay where nobody has ever defeated him — the attention arena.
The feed will prop up his fan base. The medium forgives and forgets everything by Friday. And among the hundreds of thousands of likes sits that one comment at zero: asking what kind of a prime minister does this to a citizen.