Jinder Mahal’s WWE Championship Reign: A Retrospective

Was there really any benefit of turning Jinder Mahal into a world champion?

The sudden and unexpected push of Jinder Mahal to the main event of SmackDown Live has been a controversial decision. There has been a great deal of discussion on Mahal’s worthiness of being champion as well as the assets he’d bring to the table.

The biggest argument for his championship coronation was based on diversity, i.e. having a new challenger instead of the same people all the time. The other big argument was that Mahal’s sudden push was executed so that WWE could capitalize on a growing fan base in India. They thought that making Mahal into the WWE Champion would further elevate the brand’s global reach and thus increase their international viewership and merchandise sales.

Yet despite all of these claims, Mahal hasn’t been the best of champions. Despite several attempts to make him into a big deal, Mahal hasn’t set the world on fire as he was meant to. Even now, as he enters his third month as WWE Champion, Mahal has done very little to actually impress anyone, especially WWE’s North American audience.

With SummerSlam around the corner, there’s the possibility that Mahal could lose the championship at that event. Since that possibility looms overhead, let’s look at Mahal’s championship run thus far and see where WWE went wrong in attempting to make Mahal into a credible champion.

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Jinder Mahal’s main event push was bungled from the very beginning, especially since it came out of nowhere. Less than a year ago, Mahal was going an unfunny ‘I come in peace’ gimmick and was jobbing out to midcarders on RAW. Then, he was the last man eliminated in the Andre the Giant Memorial Battle Royal at WrestleMania 33.

Logic would’ve dictated that the winner of that match would’ve been the one to get the push. If WWE planned on pushing Mahal all along, why couldn’t he have been booked to win that match, in order to have at least some credibility going into the main event? Instead, WWE went with a random win for Mojo Rawley, who has since been destroyed by Mahal in a few matches and has gotten no push whatsoever.

Thus, fans were expected to believe that Mahal had credibility in the world title picture from winning only a single battle royale. He hadn’t really proved himself; WWE’s bookers just thrust him into the main event as an unproven wrestler who just so happened to have a good physique.

Of course, opinions of Mahal wouldn’t have been so bad if he actually excited people with his matches and his wrestling moves. Despite receiving a monumental push, Mahal didn’t really do anything to excite fans when he was in the ring. Even if today’s fans aren’t as interested in the psychology of a wrestling match as in decades past, the one thing they do enjoy is wrestling moves. They want to see wrestlers win with cool and impressive moves.

Mahal’s finisher, a Cobra Clutch Slam, is not one of those moves.

The move itself is unimpressive, doesn’t look like it hurts that much, and has little build-up to it. With so many possibilities for a finisher, Mahal was given a boring move that basically turns into another back slam, nothing more. How are fans supposed to get behind a wrestler with such a move, especially when the others around him have more popular and exciting moves (i.e. the RKO, the Styles Clash, the Pop-up Powerbomb, the End of Days, etc.)?

They don’t, that’s how.

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The next problem was Mahal’s gimmick. He became another anti-American heel that loved his country more than the one in which he lived. Mahal repeated the same old ‘I hate America’ lines that have been spewed out by heels for literally decades, and WWE expected most people to go along with this and actually give him a reaction.

Unfortunately for them, many fans are tired of these stereotypical ‘angry foreigner’ gimmicks. Fans these days want more realistic and personal storylines that center on a wrestler’s personality, as opposed to some forced narrative based on nationality.

It also seemed counterintuitive for WWE to present Mahal – a person whom they want as a top star to sell merchandise in India – as a heel. This is especially important because many fans in India still hold to kayfabe to a greater extent than North American fans, and would thus be less enthusiastic about supporting a heel, even if that heel represents their country.

Take Rusev, for example. WWE keeps going back to the ‘he hates America’ aspect of his gimmick, which feels like a step back for him, especially since Rusev has done everything possible to get that gimmick over. If Rusev can’t do so anymore, what hope does Mahal have?

Finally, and most importantly, Jinder Mahal hasn’t been made to look strong in the majority of his segments or matches. More often than not, he has had to rely on the Singh Brothers to help him, and at Battleground, he recruited the aid of the returning Great Khali, which only further proved how weak of a champion Mahal really was. Fans could tell: the fact that Mahal needed help from three people (one of whom is a literal giant) on top of the match itself being as gimmicked as possible shows how weak Mahal really is.

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Without all of these stipulations and shenanigans, Mahal would’ve certainly lost his championship and wouldn’t have been in such a prominent position in the first place. That’s the message that comes across through Mahal’s booking. Mahal himself doesn’t look strong in singles matches very often, and the Singh Brothers don’t even wrestle regularly on SmackDown, despite being trained wrestlers.

Now, WWE has reintroduced Khali as another desperate measure to get people interested in Mahal. But the truth is that Khali himself might steal the spotlight away from Mahal simply because of his own size and stature.

Mahal has proven himself the opposite of Brock Lesnar: when Lesnar debuted, he was pushed to the moon and won the WWE Championship within months.But he was so successful because he was protected, he looked strong, and he backed up his look with a vicious finisher and looked unstoppable in every scenario. He didn’t need anyone’s help to win his matches; he could do everything and anything he wanted to.

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Mahal couldn’t hope to find much success without outside interference and without relying on underhanded tactics to win. It appears that WWE couldn’t book Mahal in a more dominant fashion, even in a handful of circumstances. If they did, there’s a good chance that Mahal would actually be over with the audience in some respect.

Instead, Mahal has ended up as something of a flop as WWE Champion.