Balen Shah raps court over order on Hindi film screening

Nepal: Kathmandu Mayor Balendra Shah said he will not abide by the ruling of the Patan High Court that ordered the authorities not to bar the screening of Hindi movies in Kathmandu.

                                                     photo: balen shah

The court had issued an interlocutory order asking the authorities not to intervene in the screening of any movie cleared by the censor board in Nepal.

Soon after that, Shah took to social media to lambast the court order.

Shah not only vented his ire against the court’s decision but also went on to say that the court and the government had become ‘slaves’ to the southern neighbour India.

“Yasko lagi jun sukai sajaya bhogna tayar chhu tara film chaldaina ra chalna diyine chhaina [I am ready to face any consequences, but the film will not be screened and it will not be permitted for screening],” the mayor wrote on Facebook.

Legal experts say Shah’s remarks that he will not abide by the court’s decision is unconstitutional and could push him into legal trouble.

They said the comment is against Article 126(2), Article 128(4), Article 139 (2) and Article 151(1) and is an act of contempt of the court.

Article 126(2) states that all shall abide by the orders or decisions made by courts in the course of the hearing of a lawsuit.

Likewise, Article 126(2) states that the Supreme Court may initiate proceedings of contempt and impose punishment in case someone obstructs the dispensation of justice or disregards any order or judgement handed down by it or any of its subordinate courts.

As per the Article, the apex court can initiate a case against Shah as his statement amounts to contempt of court.

Similarly, Article 139(2) of the constitution states that the High Court may initiate proceedings on and impose punishment for contempt, as provided for in the federal law in case anyone obstructs the dispensation of justice by, or disregard any order or judgement handed down by it or any of its subordinate courts or judicial institutions.

Hearing a petition filed by the Nepal Motion Picture Association, a single bench of judge Dhir Bahadur Chand ordered that the screening of films that have been cleared by the censor board not be stopped.

Even before the court issued a written order, Shah took to social media, dubbing the court and the government as ‘slaves’ of India. He didn’t stop there and warned he will not allow the screening of the film.

Senior advocate Sambhu Thapa says Shah’s remarks amount to contempt of court.

“The mayor is not above the law,” he said. “The constitution clearly says that the court has the right to hear cases against the decision of a metropolis and he has no freedom to disobey the court order.”

Thapa argued that it is in contravention of the constitution to say that he will not obey the decision of the court established as per the constitution. Moreover, Shah was elected to the post as per the provisions of the same charter.

“The court can itself initiate the process of filing a case,” said Thapa. “At a minimum, the defendant may be punished for contempt while at the most the person may even lose the post, so it depends on how the court interprets it.”

However, the court thus far had not stripped anyone of their public position in a contempt of court case in Nepal, according to Thapa.

“But you can’t also say that it will never happen,” said Thapa, who is also the former president of the Nepal Bar Association.

“The extent of punishment will be determined by the court’s interpretation and conclusion. But his expression amounts to contempt, prima facie, as no one can say that they will disobey the court.”

Shah’s Facebook status had received over 211,000 likes and over 42,000 comments within seven hours since it was posted.

Advocates say the remark should be taken seriously as this could erode public trust in the judiciary when a people’s representative with a huge following on social media makes random comments against the judiciary.

When ‘new leaders’ say they will not follow the rule of law, it can lead to chaos, Mohan Lal Acharya, a constitutional lawyer, said.

He argues that people’s representatives cannot say they will not respect the orders and judgments of the courts, which even dictatorial military regimes and autocratic monarchs are forced to obey.

“Even a monarch cannot say he will not accept the court’s decision. The elected mayor does not have the privilege to disobey the court’s order,” said Acharya.

“You always have the option of appealing if you don’t like a court’s order. But you cannot disobey its order.”

Pakistan’s top court had disqualified the country’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani from office after he was found guilty of contempt for refusing to comply with a Supreme Court order.

Acharya argues the court can take similar action against Shah, taking the Pakistan case as a precedent.

Mayor Balendra Shah is unstoppable. A man on a mission, Shah shows no fear of hurdles, legal or otherwise, and is unequivocal about his mission to transform the metropolitan city. Only that he is headed in the wrong direction, and his mission is guided by a myopic vision of what a city should be like.

For Shah, a city is a gentrified, boutique-style showpiece that has no place for the poor. Each day, Shah’s city police officers perform an unbearable spectacle on the streets, upending fruit carts and chasing poor vendors. His officers regularly roam around in bulldozers, razing buildings even when the homeowners plead for a chance to produce their papers of legitimate ownership. In Shah’s vision, a municipal mayorship is a one-man show where there is no space for debate, discussion and difference of opinion. Hardly has the mayor of the capital city in his short stint in power shown any inclination towards the spirit of cooperation between three levels of governance as envisioned by the constitution of the federal democratic republic.

In over a year of his service ordisservice, as his victims may want to put it thre is perhaps no public institution with which the rapper-turned-mayor has not sparred. The latest such institution is the judiciary, as he signalled in a tweet on Thursday that he would dishonour the Patan High Court’s interim order to allow the showing of Hindi films in the metro city. Those who have faced Shah’s wrath in the past belong to the high corridors of Singha Durbar to street corners alike hose in between the extremes include educational institutions, the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, private homeowners, and a hapless heritage structure along the Tukucha rivulet s Shah bulldozes his way through established norms of public participation and democratic governance.

When the people of Kathmandu Metropolitan City chose Shah as their mayor with a landslide victory, they had voted not for his street-level popularity but the hope that he would herald a change. Sick and tired of the established party leaders mired in corruption and controversy, people found in Shah a young, educated leader who represented the passion of the youth for development and prosperity. After all, he had complained in one of his pre-electoral rap songs that there was no one to speak for the poor. He had indeed been elected as their leader. If only his electorate knew that he considered the poor an enemy.

There is no denying his attempts at bringing some positive changes—he has named and shamed schools and hospitals that fail to fulfil their duties; he has made some earnest attempts at managing the city’s ever-growing waste problem; and made some significant strides at digitalising the city’s public service system. However, the good is almost always shadowed by the bad, and Shah’s stunts are ugly. At his heart, Balendra Shah, the Balen of his rapper avatar, increasingly appears to be a rebel without a cause. Pumped up by the cheers of a sadistic crowd that gathers to enjoy the spectacle of the mayor’s bulldozers razing buildings made with somebody’s blood and sweat, Shah ticks all the marks of populist desperation bordering on authoritarianism.

Hiding his true self behind those iconic shades, the mayor of Kathmandu is fast metamorphosing from a youth icon into a reckless figure out there to diss, dismiss and defeat his imaginary opponents—and that is a dangerous trait in a democracy.