What warranted all of this? The music video, whatever remnants of it are still available on the internet, is hardly Badshah’s most provocative. But it is the lyrics that leave no room for interpretation. “” (Badshah arriving to ride them all like mares). Set against the dancing schoolgirls, the lyrics instruct the eye on how to look.
Renu Bhatia, the commission’s chairperson, did not mince words. Known to have a flair for the dramatic, she said that Badshah’s actions were unforgivable and the insult to the daughters of the state was completely intolerable.
Naturally, Badshah’s defenders—of which there are many—have been swarming comment sections with the energy of men who have never once questioned what they stream. Their responses range across two directions. First, Tateeree was a diss track, a shot across the bow at Badshah’s male competition. The offending lines were not directed at the women at all, but a genre-standard move in hip-hop’s long tradition of competitive mud-slinging.
Second, women—and by extension, anyone clutching their pearls over this—just don’t have the chops to hip-hop. Both arguments are, at their core, the same .
Badshah’s acolytes are not entirely wrong. Tateeree was aimed at men. But it is worth pausing here to ask who, exactly, Badshah’s opponents even are. This is a man whose discography includes Delhi sangeet staples like DJ Wale Babu, Abhi Toh Party Shuru Hui Hai, and Garmi that promise everyone a good time.
What war is being waged here? What territory is being defended? In the universe of a nightclub or a dance floor, the most important statement Badshah has ever made is something fatuous like “Body teri hotter than chinchilla fur”. And yet, to make his point to these supposed opponents, he reached for schoolgirls—misogyny at its most complete.
Badshah’s music has always operated in an essentially homoerotic universe—in the sense that its real audience has always been male. The women in his songs are not the inhabitants of his world so much as the foliage in the background. They are what the men gesture at while dissing each other. This is a world where gyrating women or a group of schoolgirls can be deployed in someone else’s turf war.
Yet, Badshah is not alone in targeting women. Hip-hop’s misogyny is a widely documented open conversation that remains unresolved in 2026. The genre was born in Black American communities, a reaction to the dispossession and structural violence faced by them. But a lot of that rage was directed downward, at Black women.
American professor Moya Bailey’s term captures the specific texture of this: the simultaneous hypersexualisation and degradation of Black women’s bodies that became the genre’s commercial template.
Even at its most celebrated, hip-hop has treated women as weapons used in a war waged between men. The best illustration of this is the juicy 2024 feud between rappers Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Over a series of escalating diss tracks, the two men about the other’s treatment of women. Lamar was accused of domestic abuse; Drake of being a paedophile.
But none of these tracks accounted for the women involved: Not the harm they endured, not what they were owed. Their suffering was just ammo.
That Badshah is misogynistic is, at this point, not a particularly illuminating observation. The misogyny is a creative condition of his music, as fundamental to it as the buzzy beat drop.
His discography is littered with explicit descriptions of women being sized up by body part, for instance, “Jahan se hona chahiye wahi se hai tu thick” in or “Bum tera gotey khaye” from the plagiarised . Their unravelling after being used and discarded is framed as entertainment, as with “Pehle ganda kiya phir khud hi dhone lagi” in .
In 2017, a group of Delhi University colleges reached the same conclusion and Badshah, Yo Yo Honey Singh, and other rappers from performing at their festivals.
This pattern of swaggering sexism holds off the mic, too. Last year, when asked about a potential collaboration with , Badshah suggested that he’d “rather make babies with her”. He doubled down when faced with backlash: “I think one of the most beautiful compliments that you could give to a woman that you really admire is to wish for her to mother your children.”
Can a man, who has spent 15 years telling women in no uncertain terms what their bodies are for, have anything other than the noblest of intentions?
In a 2023 interview, Badshah had , “I don’t approve of music that glorifies objectification of women. I have female family members at home, and my music comes from a place of responsibility and respect.” When pressed on specific lyrics, his defence was that he takes lyrical liberties for entertainment, because art is ultimately about freedom. Sometimes, though, that freedom has consequences—even for a ‘Haryana ka beta’.
It is at this point that someone will insist, again, that India just doesn’t get hip hop. To which we might say, this is a country that has produced MC Kash, who has rapped about Kashmir and has faced real consequences for it, where Ginni Mahi has pioneered Chamar Pop, and where Divine has documented Dharavi. “India” understands this genre perfectly—though the same can’t be said for Bollywood.
Bollywood’s version of hip hop is scrubbed clean of caste, class, and political discomfort, and all that remains of its bite is the braggadocio and the misogyny. Badshah is the most bankable product of this selection, though he isn’t the only one. Yo Yo Honey Singh has built his career on the same vile template, while Karan Aujla has been before the Punjab State Women’s Commission over his lyrics. Last year, Guru Randhawa had his own schoolgirl .
If Badshah can’t weather this storm, the genre will find another man with nothing true or powerful to say.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)
