Despite being involved in high-profile angles with The Rock and former World Heavyweight Champion Seth Rollins, Jinder Mahal was released by WWE earlier this year.
The news came as a surprise to fans, though it did feel a little like the Modern Day Maharajah had run his course in the company after being brought back in 2016.
Way back in a 2017 promo, Mahal traded barbs with Shinsuke Nakamura in a promo which saw him mock the King of Strong Style for being Japanese. You can find that on YouTube, but he at one point told Nakamura that "you all 'rook' the same."
In a new interview with Chris Van Vliet, Mahal reflected on the segment and confirmed he was forced into saying those lines because they had been written by former WWE Chairman Vince McMahon.
"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, no, no, no, don’t worry, who cares? It’s not you. It’s a character, just entertainment.’"
"So, 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 P.R. and Vince wants for you to tweet something, like a statement.’ I said, ‘Okay, cool’ and he came up with something, maybe the P.R. 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. 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 would go on to reveal that when he pushed back on the promo and asked again if they could do something else, he was told that because Vince wrote it, "'You can either do it or you take your ball and go home.'"
Things in WWE have changed for the better on Triple H's watch and it's hard to imagine us ever seeing the sort of outdated, offensive promos and segments which dominated his time as head of creative.
Check out the full interview with Mahal in the player below.