On India’s Got Latent 2, Samay Raina asked Badshah who came up with his stage name. After the rapper attributed himself for the same, Samay claimed that he’s heard a different story. Badshah, gauging that Samay is referring to the popular belief that it was Honey Singh who came up with his stage name, quickly corrected the stand-up comedian and claimed that it’s a false narrative.
Back in the late 2000s, Badshah and Honey Singh were frequent collaborators. They were part of the group Mafia Mundeer, along with Raftaar, Ikka and Lil Golu. However, soon, issues began cropping up over credits, leading to a bitter fallout. While the two did seem to have put their past behind in recent years, instances like these show that their feud is still very much on.
Four years ago, in an interview with journalist Siddharth Kannan, Honey claimed that Badshah introduced himself as Cool Equal and would rap in English, before he convinced him to rap in Hindi instead. “I won’t rap in Hindi, it’s very local,” Badshah responded, as per Honey. “I suggested him to record half a song in English and half a song in Hindi and play it for your cousins. He came back the next day and said that his cousins were singing along with the Hindi part. I told him to work on it. I told him, ‘You can achieve it, you can do it,'” added the singer.
However, Honey also clarified that they buried the hatchet in 2020 during a Diwali party after overcoming the initial awkwardness. “I went up to him and met him. We drank and danced together. We drank a lot together. We are all brothers. There are no differences between us. People just make stuff up,” said Honey.
In 2023, Badshah alleged on Raj Shamani’s podcast that Honey Singh dodged his calls back in 2009, when they were part of the same group. “We made songs but they were not released. Honey was just concentrating on his career,” said the rapper, claiming that Honey became very “self-centered.” “On one hand, you call us brothers, but on the other, you fail to acknowledge our struggles. He made us sign blank papers; what about those contracts? It was a tough phase,” recalled Badshah.
During GraFest 2024, in the midst of his performance, Badshah proposed to end the feud with Honey. “There was a phase in my life where I held this grudge against one, and now I want to call it quits and leave that grudge behind – and that’s Honey Singh. I was unhappy because of some misunderstanding, but then I realised when we were together, jodne waale bahut kam the, todne waale bahut the (The number of people wanting to break us apart outnumbered the number of people trying to unite). Today, I just want to let everyone know I’ve left that phase behind and I wish him all the best,” he said.
However, Honey didn’t take too kindly to Badshah’s olive branch. “A fight happens between two people when both are involved, but for 10 years, one man kept abusing me, making songs about me, mocking my illness, and I never responded,” said Honey, alleging that Badshah took potshots at his bipolar disorder through his music.
He added that it was only in 2024 that he began responding to Badshah after his fans claimed that he had to protect his dignity. “He is one of those who spits and then licks it back; just watch, he’ll flip again. I don’t consider people like that to be anything,” said Honey to India Today. Months after that, when a fan shared a slimmed-down picture of Honey on X and asked, “What does he eat?,” Badshah cheekily responded to it and said, “Credits.” Badshah has claimed that he wrote the lyrics of Honey’s 2011 hit “Brown Rang” and contributed to “Angrezi Beat”, another hit track that released in the same year, but never got proper credit for both.
