Aditya Prateek Singh Sisodia, who performs under the stage name Badshah, meaning king, has built one of the most commercially successful careers in Indian popular music. He commands millions of streams, millions in brand endorsements, and the kind of cultural visibility that comes from being on every Bollywood playlist, every wedding DJ set, every aspirational commercial. He has, in the language of the industry, made it.
A close look at how he made it reveals a pattern that is not merely unfortunate. It is a quiet, persistent, and commercially deliberate use of women as props, a pilfering of other people’s creative labour, and, when caught, a masterclass in the art of the hollow apology.
The Tateeree Debacle: Not an Aberration, a Signature
On 1 March 2026, Badshah released a Haryanvi track called Tateeree. The music video featured girls dressed in school style uniforms performing suggestive dance moves in what appeared to be a classroom setting. Critics alleged that the lyrics objectify women and contain references that sexualise school going girls. Within days, the Haryana State Commission for Women had summoned him, and Panchkula Cyber Crime Police registered an FIR under Section 296 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita and Sections 3 and 4 of the Indecent Representation of Women (Prohibition) Act, 1986. Authorities also initiated the process of issuing a Look Out Circular to prevent him from leaving India.
Faced with mounting pressure, Badshah issued an apology, pulled the song from all platforms, and deployed the most time worn of defence strategies: he claimed the lyrics were intended for a hip hop competition context and not directed at women or children. He also called himself the son of Haryana to lend himself cultural legitimacy.
Singer Sona Mohapatra was having none of it. She wrote that this was not the first time the template had been seen, describing it as a man puffing up his chest, flexing masculinity, objectifying women, and projecting himself as some irresistible hero while women exist merely to drool around him. She called it the laziest trope in pop culture rather than creativity. She also made a point that deserves to be the headline of every piece written about this episode: Haryana already battles some of the country’s worst gender ratios, violence against women, and honour killings. Cultural influence carries responsibility.
The lyrics Mohapatra quoted illustrate the formula precisely. Tu mujhpe marti hai, mujhpe jaan chidakti hai. You die for me, you shower your life on me. The woman exists solely to worship, to desire, to validate. Across Badshah’s discography, from DJ Waley Babu to Genda Phool, women appear not as subjects with agency but as decorative accessories to male success. They sway in the background, they gaze adoringly, they serve the male fantasy. They rarely speak, rarely initiate, rarely possess interiority. The difference with Tateeree is only that it crossed into imagery involving schoolgirls, which was finally too explicit to ignore.
The invocation of culture as justification is particularly insidious. It suggests misogyny is simply regional flavour rather than a choice artists make. But Badshah is not a folk singer documenting rural realities. He is a commercial phenomenon whose work reaches millions across digital platforms, shaping aspirations and normalising attitudes. When artists with his reach perpetuate these notions, they become active participants in maintaining the very gender hierarchies that make Haryana’s statistics on violence against women tragically predictable.
The Genda Phool Affair: Stealing From the Powerless
In March 2020, Badshah released Genda Phool, a slick festive track featuring Jacqueline Fernandez that achieved over a billion YouTube views and became one of the most watched music videos of that year. It was a genuine cultural moment, and Badshah was credited as composer and lyricist.
There was one problem. The song was based on a Bengali folk composition, Boro Loker Biti Lo, written by Ratan Kahar in 1972, without any acknowledgement of the original artist. Kahar stated in Bengali newspapers that he was pained his due credit had been denied. He was not a corporation with lawyers. He was an 80 plus year old singer living in poverty in Birbhum district’s Siuri town.
The original song is sung from the point of view of an unmarried mother, a woman abandoned by her wealthy lover, tying her daughter’s long hair. It is a song of heartbreak and class inequality. In Badshah’s hands, the video sexually fetishises a woman, jeopardising the original tune’s history and profound context entirely.
Badshah’s initial response was to claim that his research team had found no copyright registration for the song. The defence was technically convenient and morally bankrupt. He eventually sent Kahar five lakh rupees. For a song that generated billions of streams and commensurate advertising revenue, this was tokenistic at best. The fact that it required a national internet outrage campaign to extract even that speaks volumes. The episode is, at its core, not very different from tipping a waiter with loose change after stealing their wallet.
The Fake Views Scandal: Fraudulence as Career Strategy
In 2020, Mumbai Police’s Crime Branch unearthed a fake social media followers racket and found Badshah near the centre of it. Police officials stated that Badshah confessed to having paid 72 lakh rupees to buy 7.2 crore views for his song Pagal Hai in a bid to set a world record. He had claimed the music video had been watched 75 million times in its first 24 hours, beating records previously set by Taylor Swift and BTS. The claim was rejected by Google.
He was questioned for over ten hours and called in again the following day to answer 238 questions prepared by the Crime Branch. A 446 page chargesheet was subsequently filed. Badshah denied the allegations publicly, even as police sources stated he had confessed during questioning.
The logic of the scam is worth examining because it reveals how the entire architecture of his mainstream success has been constructed. Fake views inflate perceived popularity, which commands higher brand endorsement fees, which attract more label investment, which fund bigger productions, which generate organic attention that papers over the manufactured kind. The house of cards is held together by the very same manufactured public adoration that surrounds his treatment of women. Nobody questions the king.
Extraction Wearing a Crown
What ties these episodes together is not incompetence but a consistent disposition towards every person and every piece of cultural raw material he exploits. Women in his work are a scenic resource, available, admiring, and decorative. Folk artists from marginalised communities are a creative resource, their labour available for repackaging without attribution. His public persona, inflated by purchased metrics, is a commercial resource available for sale to brands eager for authentic reach.
Each time the apparatus is exposed, the same playbook deploys: apology, humility, some gesture of restitution, the invocation of cultural roots, and then a quiet return to business as usual. Tateeree is gone from platforms, but the template remains.
Sona Mohapatra’s challenge is that artists must choose between challenging misogyny and profiting from it. Badshah has answered that question unmistakably with every career decision. He profits. Women provide the backdrop for that profit. Ratan Kahar’s life’s work provides the raw material. Manufactured numbers provide the credibility. And when the cameras roll and the algorithm rewards another hundred million views, the king takes his bow.
The title, as it turns out, was always the tell.
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