Honey Singh Drugs, Recovery and BJP Punjab: The Full Story Behind the Meeting
BJP’s Tarun Chugh wants Honey Singh as Punjab’s anti-drugs face ahead of 2027. But who is Honey Singh, what did drugs do to him, and what does Punjab’s crisis actually look like? North Desk explains.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, May 26
It’s a story about Yo Yo Honey Singh, a story of Honey Singh — Drugs, Recovery and BJP Punjab. BJP’s Punjab leader Tarun Chugh sat down with India’s most famous recovering addict on Tuesday — and the meeting was about much more than music.
Tarun Chugh, the party’s national general secretary and the man widely credited with engineering the defection of six AAP Rajya Sabha MPs from Punjab to the BJP recently, received rapper Yo Yo Honey Singh in Delhi and made a public appeal: use your voice, your story, your songs to pull Punjab’s youth away from chitta. Honey Singh, speaking in Punjabi, said he had come to discuss what drugs were doing to Punjab’s families. He was felicitated with a shawl. He has not joined the BJP.
It was a carefully staged moment. And to understand what it means — politically and personally — you need two things: the scale of Punjab’s drug crisis, and the full story of Hirdesh Singh.
Punjab’s drug wound
Drug addiction has been a defining issue in Punjab politics for two decades, but the numbers have not improved. According to Punjab’s Health Department data, the state recorded 782 confirmed drug overdose deaths between January 2024 and April 2025 alone — and health experts at PGIMER Chandigarh estimate the real figure could be two to three times higher, as many families conceal addiction-related deaths due to stigma.
The state is reported to have the third highest number of drug-related arrests in the country. Chitta, a cheap and highly addictive form of heroin, is the dominant substance. The average age at which young people first use drugs has dropped to 15.7 years.
Despite this, Punjab consistently registers among the highest NDPS case counts in India — 9,025 cases in 2024 alone, still the second highest nationally even after a declining trend. The AAP government’s Yuddh Nasheyan Viruddh crackdown launched in March 2025 resulted in over 34,000 arrests across 23,000 cases within months, with more than 1,500 kg of heroin recovered.
The numbers indicate effort. They also indicate the problem is not resolved. For a BJP that holds just two of Punjab’s 117 assembly seats and is assembling its 2027 campaign piece by piece, the drug issue is both a genuine concern and a political opportunity.
Who is Tarun Chugh
Chugh hails from an Amritsar family whose three generations have been in the RSS. He started out as a BJP booth in-charge in 1989 and has steadily built himself into the first leader from Punjab to serve as BJP national office-bearer four times consecutively, and national general secretary twice in a row.
He has never won a state assembly election — he contested Amritsar Central in both 2012 and 2017, losing both times — but his organisational clout has only grown. His most consequential recent act was facilitating the mass defection of AAP’s Rajya Sabha MPs, a move that gave the BJP six of Punjab’s seven RS seats without winning a single vote in the state. He is the party’s most active Punjab hand, and this meeting with Honey Singh was no accident.
Who is Hirdesh Singh
Born on March 15, 1983 in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, Hirdesh Singh completed his schooling in Delhi before studying music at the Trinity School in the United Kingdom. He returned not as a celebrity but as a session artist — producing tracks in the background, learning the trade from the inside.
The stage name Yo Yo Honey Singh reportedly carries the prefix “Yo Yo” as shorthand for “Your Own.” What the name came to mean was something else entirely. In 2011, his collaboration with Diljit Dosanjh — Lak 28 Kudi Da — reached number one on the BBC Asian Download Charts. His album International Villager that year, followed by a string of Bollywood collaborations, turned him into a phenomenon. By 2013, Lungi Dance from Chennai Express had made him a household name from Delhi to Dubai.
At his peak, he was among India’s highest-paid entertainers — reportedly charging ₹1 crore or more per live show — and appeared on the Forbes India Celebrity 100 list two years running, an honour usually reserved for Bollywood royalty, not independent musicians.
Then, in 2014, he disappeared.
The fall
In mid-2014, Honey Singh vanished overnight — leaving the reality show India’s Raw Star midway, cancelling concerts, going dark on social media. The truth took years to come out.
The breaking point came at a concert in Chicago where he was to perform alongside Shah Rukh Khan. He became convinced that stepping on stage would kill him. When his team forced the issue, he injured himself to avoid performing and was hospitalised. It was the moment he first accepted that something was seriously wrong.
What was wrong had been building for years. By his own account, the pressure of extreme fame combined with emerging bipolar disorder had driven him into addiction. He admitted to smoking 12 joints of charas every day for two and a half years.
He has since described himself as a “very bad case” of bipolar disorder — saying that during six years of struggle, he spent nearly three of those years having accepted that he was already dead, that each day simply would not end.
In a 2017 interview he described what those years looked like from the inside: “I didn’t come out of my room, forget stepping out of the house. I had a beard, I didn’t get a haircut for months. For someone who has performed in front of a crowd of 20,000, I was scared of facing 4–5 people. That’s what bipolar disorder does to you.”
The medication that treated the disorder caused significant weight gain. The persona he had spent a decade building collapsed entirely. He spent months unable to even listen to music, let alone make it.
The road back
Recovery was not a moment. It was years. It was not until 2021 that he found a psychiatrist he credited with genuinely understanding his condition — a doctor he described simply as “a magician.”
His first cautious public reappearance came at the Mirchi Music Awards in 2016. What followed was not a comeback but a slow crawl — navigating medication, a sleeping disorder, and the grinding work of rebuilding willpower. Makhna in 2018 was a musical foothold. A fuller return came across the years that followed.
In December 2024, the Netflix documentary Yo Yo Honey Singh: Famous — directed by Mozez Singh and produced by Sikhya Entertainment — laid out the full account publicly for the first time. The director said building trust over an extended period was essential before filming the sensitive material. Honey Singh’s former wife declined to appear on camera. The documentary received mixed reviews but generated wide conversation, particularly about mental health and the hidden costs of fame.
Honey Singh — Drugs, Recovery and BJP Punjab
No honest account of this week’s meeting can skip over what sits alongside it. Honey Singh built much of his early career on music that critics — and courts — found deeply problematic. A Delhi High Court order in March 2026 directed the takedown of several of his early underground tracks. In August 2025, the Punjab State Women’s Commission issued a notice over allegedly offensive lyrics in his track Millionaire.
His pivot to anti-drugs advocate is a complete reversal. But it is one his own biography makes uniquely credible. A man who smoked twelve joints a day, who spent three years convinced he was dead, who had to fight his way back through an illness most of India did not understand, carries a different authority on this subject than any government slogan.
Whether that authority translates into something real for Punjab’s youth — or whether it serves primarily as campaign optics ahead of 2027 — is the question this meeting leaves open.
Honey Singh has not joined the BJP. The shawl, for now, is just a shawl.
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