Raj Dhesi, aka Jinder Mahal, is now a free agent and recently appeared on Insight with Chris Van Vliet, where he discussed a wide range of topics.
During it, the former WWE star recalled a racially insensitive promo in 2017 that he had to perform while feuding with Shinsuke Nakamura. In it, he made fun of how Nakamura talked and referred to him as ‘Mr. Miyagi.’
WWE received criticism at the time and later issued a statement about it. Mahal didn’t want to do the promo, but Vince McMahon insisted on it because he thought it was pure entertainment and wouldn’t be a problem. Once he did it, the social media team told Mahal about the backlash, and at first, McMahon wanted him to issue a statement on Twitter, only to change his mind.
Mahal said, “Yeah, there was. There was one promo in particular, and recently, I actually just seen Shelton Benjamin tweet that if he could take back one thing in his career, it was a promo with Yoshitatsu. 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, ‘Aw 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 (McMahon), ‘Vince, this is gonna get negative backlash.’ He said, ‘No, don’t worry, who cares? It’s not you. It’s a character, just entertainment.’ So, [I] did the promo, was not happy with it and 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. I remember coming back from Gorilla. 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 for you to tweet something, like a statement.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool,’ and 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.’ So it was just one of those things where… it is what it is. [I’m] 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 change, the regime changed, everything is much, much different now. That was a different era, a different time. Under Vince, his style was different and sometimes he was stuck in his ways.”
Mahal continued by describing how people are not able to separate characters in wrestlers like in other entertainment.
He said, “You separate the performer from the on-screen character, but for some reason, in wrestling, in WWE, it doesn’t happen. And that’s the explanation that was given to me and I guess I was like, ‘Alright, fine. Okay, we’ll do it…’ I had asked, ‘Can we do something else? Is there anything else we can do?’ I was told, ‘No. This is what Vince wrote,’ and you can either do it, or you take your ball and go home.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TihulMCrss8
If you use any portion of the quotes from this article, please credit Insight with Chris Van Vliet with an h/t to WrestlingNews.co for the transcription.
