During the broadcast of WWE SmackDown on September 12, 2017, the then WWE Champion, Jinder Mahal, famously known as Raj Dhesi today, unleashed a racially provocative promo against Shinsuke Nakamura.
Mahal subsequently expressed remorse towards his heated promo on a recent episode of the “Insight with Chris Van Vliet” podcast. Dhesi revealed, “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.’ I regrettable did the promo, although I wasn’t pleased or proud of it. I wish I could revert that moment, but it’s impossible. Immediately after, it received a sea of negative reactions. I remember retreating from Gorilla’s backstage arena and a social media manager approached me to say, ‘Hey, it’s attracting a lot of unfavorable PR. Vince wants you to release a statement on Twitter.’ We were about to make the tweet when he backtracked saying, ‘Actually, Vince changed his mind. He said no.’ It’s in the past now, but I certainly don’t take pride in it,”.
Mahal further stated, “On the bright side, I don’t envision a promo of that nature ever reoccurring again in WWE. Things evolved. The authoritative regime changed. The WWE experience now is strikingly different from then. That was another age, a distinct epoch under Vince. His methodology was quite different, and sometimes, he could be inflexible,” .
It’s important to note that Mahal was discharged from his WWE contract in the previous month of April. The contentious promo can be viewed below: