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Few songs are as culturally-defining as Abrar Ul Haq’s ‘Nach Punjaban’ is to bhangra. The singer claims the rights to this iconic song were taken from him and “fraudulently” sold for millions to Bollywood.

In an episode of the Geo Podcast, Haq told host Mubashir Hashmi he had neither authorised the use of the song for Karan Johar’s film Jugg Jugg Jeeyo, nor was he benefitting from it.

The singer talked about how a company in London had claimed the rights to some of his most famous tracks, including ‘Nach Punjaban’ and ‘Billo De Ghar’ — something that caused problems when he re-recorded the latter for Coke Studio. He claimed the company had gotten songs taken off YouTube after wrongfully claiming to own copyrights to them.

“Look, I haven’t sold [the rights] to them, they assumed I had. And when we asked them about it, they gave a very interesting answer. They said, ‘You have that friend, Haroon, right?’ I said I did and they said I should ask Haroon… I told them I hadn’t given the rights to Haroon either, I have the rights. All they said was, ‘You can ask Haroon.’”

Haq said the company had prepared “fake documents” with “forged signatures” in London and litigation there was expensive. He said he wasn’t the only victim of this scam, other artists had been impacted too.

About Johar’s film, the singer categorically denied being asked if he was okay with his song being used in the movie. “They sold the whole film on that song, it was unfair,” he said.

Haq said he was still suing to get the rights back and described the dispute as an “open and shut case”. He said he had the option to recreate the song, maybe with new lyrics, but the original song belonged to him and he wanted it back.

“I am not the kind of guy to take music very seriously, I make it for the sake of fun, for the sake of happiness. But if it’s going to become such a big source of revenue, nobody should take someone else’s rights away.”

The back and forth between the singer and London-based Moviebox has been going on for years now, with the two parties having first traded barbs on X — then known as Twitter — in 2022. Abrar claimed at the time that Johar and his team had copied his song without permission and vowed to take them to court.

In response, Moviebox said publicly that they owned the rights to the music and had sold them to Indian label T Series. T Series later confirmed they had bought the rights from Moviebox and said, “All due credits shall be included across all platforms when song releases”.