Jinder Mahal wishes he could take back ‘racial’ WWE promo from 2017
Posted: Jul 19th 2024 By: Joseph Currier
Jinder Mahal wishes he could take back a moment from his WWE tenure.
During his WWE Championship reign in 2017, Mahal cut a promo against Shinsuke Nakamura where he was scripted to use anti-Japanese stereotypes including making fun of Nakamura’s accent. In response to the criticism the promo received, WWE issued a statement about how the company incorporates real-world issues into its programming and celebrates people of all backgrounds.
Mahal addressed the promo while appearing on the latest episode of Insight with Chris Van Vliet. Though Mahal took issue with the segment as soon as he got the script, Vince McMahon insisted that it was just entertainment. Mahal isn’t proud of himself for doing the promo and wishes he could take it back:
“There was one promo in particular. Recently, I actually just saw Shelton Benjamin tweet that if he could take back one thing in his career, it was a promo with Yoshi Tatsu. Same thing, kind of like a racial promo.
“So that day, I had the promo, I got the script from the writer, ‘This is from Vince, he wants you to say this.’ I was like, ‘Oh man, I don’t want to say [this], is there anything else we can do?’ He said, ‘No, it’s come from Vince.’ So I even asked Vince, like, ‘This is gonna get negative backlash. He said, ‘No, no, no, no, don’t worry. Who cares? It’s not you. It’s a character, it’s just entertainment.
“Did the promo, was not happy with it, not proud of myself for doing it. Really wish that I could take that moment back, but — unfortunately — I can’t. And right when we came back, it got a lot of negative backlash. Like, I remember coming back from Gorilla [position] — I was still hanging out by Gorilla and one of the social media managers came up to me and said, ‘Hey, this is getting a lot of bad PR and Vince wants you for you to tweet something, like a statement.’ I said, ‘Ok, cool.’ He came up with something, maybe the PR team wrote it, someone — he came up with a statement. And as we were about to tweet it, he said, ‘Actually, Vince changed his mind, he said no.“
Mahal said he asked if there was anything else they could do but was told the promo was what McMahon wrote. With WWE’s regime change and McMahon no longer being involved with the company, Mahal believes a promo like that will never happen again:
“It was just one of those things where — it is what it is, not proud of doing it. But on the plus side, I don’t think something like that, a promo like that, will ever happen again in WWE. Things changed, the regime changed, everything is much, much different now. That was a different era, different time. Under Vince, his style was different. And sometimes he was stuck in his ways.“
Mahal (Raj Dhesi) was released from his WWE contract this April. As of today, he’s officially a free agent and able to start his run of indie bookings.
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