Jinder Mahal Recalls Racially Insensitive Promo on Shinsuke Nakamura in 2017

– Former WWE Superstar and WWE Champion Jinder Mahal (aka Raj Dhesi) joined Insight with Chris Van Vliet recently to discuss his career, and he recalled a promo segment from WWE SmackDown in 2017 on Shinsuke Nakamura. The former Mahal spoke about not liking the promo due its racial overtones.

According to Dhesi, former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon told him not to worry about the promo since he’s portraying a character. Below are some highlights (via Fightful):

Jinder Mahal on his promo mocking Shinsuke Nakamura: “There was one promo in particular. That day, I had the promo, I got the script from the writer. ‘This is from Vince. He wants you to say this.’ I’m like, ‘Ah man. Is there anything else we can do?’ ‘No, it’s coming from Vince.’ I even asked Vince. ‘This is going to get negative backlash.’ ‘No, no, no. Don’t worry. Who cares. It’s not you. It’s a character. Just entertain them.'”

On Vince McMahon changing his mind about tweeting a response to the promo: “I did the promo. Was not happy with it. Not proud of myself for doing it. Really wish that I could take that moment back. Unfortunately, I can’t. Right when we came back, it got a lot of negative backlash. I remember coming back from Gorilla. I was 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. Vince wants for you to tweet a statement.’ ‘Okay. Cool.’ He came up with something. Maybe the PR team wrote it. He came up with a statement, and as we were about to tweet it, he said, ‘Actually, Vince changed his mind. He said no.'”

On not being proud of it: “It was one of those things where, it is what it is. I’m not proud of doing it. On the plus side, I don’t think a promo like that will ever happen again in WWE. Things changed. The regime changed. Everything is much different now. That was a different era. Different time under Vince. His style was different. Sometimes, he was stuck in his ways.”

You can view a clip of the promo in question below.