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Talha Anjum turned a few heads in November when, during a concert in Nepal, he received an Indian flag from a fan and draped it over his shoulders. While the move was met with mixed reactions, an interview with Nadia Khan had the entertainment industry rally around him to condemn the host’s aggressive line of questioning.

Months later, he revisited the controversy surrounding his Kathmandu concert and talked about the interview on the Geo Podcast with Mubashir Hashmi.

Hashmi brought the incident up by singing the rapper’s praises and saying that Anjum is popular around the world, so a fan presenting him with a flag was simply a gesture of love.

Hashmi said Pakistanis had a record of being the more sane voices when it came to cross-border matters and said he found the way Anjum was treated to be “completely unacceptable”. He asked the rapper for his views on this, adding that many people condemned it at the time.

“I wasn’t expecting that and that’s mostly because I don’t do interviews and wherever I go, I try for there to be a point to it. I don’t talk to people for no reason,” Anjum replied.

He said he had been following the news in the aftermath of his concert and found mixed reactions, with senior artists who had been to India — who “knew what it feels like when a fan shows love to you,” in the rapper’s words — supporting his point of view.

The two agreed there were double standards in the way people dealt with Indian and Pakistani artists interacting. “When Diljit [Dosanjh] does a concert and invites Hania Aamir on to the stage, we celebrate,” Hashmi said, with Anjum calling this behaviour “hypocrisy”.

Coming to the interview, the rapper said in the days following his concert, one channel “had gone after him” and he felt he needed to go on to their show and explain himself.

“When the interview started, the way I was spoken to, I don’t talk to anyone like that and I don’t want anyone to talk to me that way. Sitting there, I felt like I was a politician.”

Anjum said he corrected her, still respected her, and wished her the best of luck, but thought she “must have learnt that you don’t do this”. That earned a hearty laugh from Hashmi who said, “Yeah, she sure found out.”

The rapper’s tone was similarly celebratory at the onset of the flag controversy, when he said he would “do it again” in a now-deleted post on X.

Later, facing backlash from the public, he issued an “unconditional” apology on Khan’s show, saying he had lost track in the heat of the moment.

The host’s behaviour on the show was called out for being aggressive, especially by celebrities. At the time, Yasir Hussain and Khaqan Shahnawaz even compared Khan to firebrand Indian TV personality Arnab Goswami.