BJP MLA Thakur Raja Singh Lodh allegedly copies Pakistan ISPR anthem, changes words to dedicate to Indian armed forces

On 12 April, Thakur Raja Singh Lodh, a BJP member of the Telangana Assembly representing the Goshamahal constituency in Hyderabad, tweeted a video of him singing a song dedicated to the Indian armed forces. However, he has been accused of copying the song from the official anthem of Pakistan's ISPR.

Two days after the video posted, Pakistan Army Major General Asif Ghafoor and the director general of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR), claimed that the original version is the official song of the ISPR and that Lodh had ended up copying it.

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Ghafoor and many others pointed out that the song and lyrics of Lodh's song were similar to "Pakistan Zindabad", a song sung by Pakistani singer Sahir Ali Bagga. The song released was released by the ISPR, the media wing of the Pakistan armed forces, on 17 March — showing Bagga singing the song in a cricket stadium at the PSL final 2019— and later published again on 23 March on the occasion of Pakistan Day with visuals of the Pakistan Amy in the background.

The BJP legislator, however, claimed that he was "clueless" about the existence of a Pakistani version of his song. "I don't have any clue about this Pakistani song. How do I know what the team composes or does? I didn't even hear this Pakistani song even until now," Lodh told The Times of India. When asked about the composer of the song, the MLA reportedly said, "We have a team that sat together and composed."

Later, he also released a video in which he said that he was happy to see the Pakistani media covering his song but no one in India was desperate enough to copy songs from Pakistan, a country that produced terrorists. "I didn't even know that a terrorist state can also have singers. We have no necessity to copy a song from Pakistan, a terrorist state. We have everything in India, people who write songs and those who sing," he said in the video.

Ghafoor then replied to his tweet by saying that the song is known to the world as "something else" and stuck to his earlier comment — "But copy to speak the truth as well” — saying it says valid as expected and termed the minister's remarks "lie".

Lodh was earlier in news for calling the old-city area in Hyderabad as Pakistan. In February 2018, he had called for the removal of Sania Mirza as the brand ambassador of Telangana. "We don’t need to make a Pakistani daughter-in-law our brand ambassador."