IMAGE: REUTERS
A KANTIPUR DAILY reporter was filming evicted squatters sheltering under tarpaulin in the rain at a rehabilitation centre in Kirtipur in April when a municipal police officer grabbed his arm and demanded he delete the footage. When the reporter asked what law gave the officer that authority, the answer was the phrase that has become this government’s unofficial motto: orders from above. The same officer reportedly compared carrying a press card to carrying a gun, asking if owning a firearm meant you got to fire it indiscriminately. Around the same period, the Nepali Army issued a public warning about “misleading content and fabricated narratives” online, announcing it was monitoring social and mass media and instructing the public to rely only on official press releases. A YouTuber named Roshan Pokharel spent four days in custody in Panchthar district for using harsh language about the prime minister on his channel, released only after Gen Z activists made enough noise. None of these episodes, on its own, proves a coordinated strategy. Together they describe one with unusual precision.
The most useful place to start is not March, when Shah took office, but February, while he was still mayor of Kathmandu. A local journalist named Kamal Bahadur Bohara published a critical story about him, received phone calls from people connected to the mayor’s office within days and was physically assaulted in the street shortly after. That sequence, intimidation following criticism, traceable back to people in Shah’s orbit, predates his premiership by more than a year.
It matters because it shows the pattern is not a new feature of holding national power. It is a habit that just moved with him into a much bigger office.
What makes the current version calculated, rather than merely thuggish, is how cleanly each piece of it can be defended in isolation. The decision to route all government advertising exclusively to state media, announced in Shah’s first weeks, can be presented as a sensible cost-saving and anti-corruption measure, and was in fact justified partly on those grounds.
It also happens to remove a big revenue stream from every private outlet that might cover the government critically, achieving through budget lines what an outright ban could never achieve without international condemnation. The army’s warning about disinformation can be presented as legitimate concern about a polarised information environment, the kind every country’s military occasionally voices. It also happens to license the harassment of any journalist whose reporting an official decides, after the fact, to call misleading. A prime minister who declines interview requests cannot be accused of censoring anyone. He can also never be asked a direct question he has not chosen in advance to answer.
This is the part that connects Shah’s domestic media strategy to a habit this publication has already documented in his foreign policy: a consistent preference for selective non-engagement as a form of control. Shah has declined one-on-one meetings with senior American and Indian envoys, preferring collective sessions or simply staying away, while sending ministers and party officials to handle the substance.
He has applied the identical instinct to the Nepali press, declining the format, the individual interview, that would require him to answer follow-up questions in real time, while remaining constantly present through the channels he fully controls. His own April asset declaration recorded Rs14.6m earned from social media, the same platforms that helped make him mayor and then prime minister without ever requiring him to sit across from an editor who might push back.
That asymmetry is the actual weapon, more than any single ordinance or arrest. Shah does not need to silence Nepali journalism outright, and has not tried to. He needs only to make traditional, adversarial press engagement consistently more costly and less necessary than it used to be, while his own unmediated channels remain wide open.
Reporters Without Borders still rates Nepal’s press as the freest in South Asia, a fact the government can point to whenever criticised, even as the tools available to a prime minister this online, this disciplined about access and this cozy governing through ordinance rather than explanation continue to narrow what that freedom can actually achieve in practice. The silence is not an absence of strategy. In Shah’s case three years and two offices into a career built almost entirely on controlling his own narrative, it may be the strategy that has worked best. ■
