By Ananya Sharma 
Chennai, March 7: Fine. Let us just say it plainly. Vijay has made a mess.
Not his enemies. Not the DMK. Not Edappadi. Him. And the frustrating part, the part that is driving even his most loyal supporters absolutely crazy right now, is that nobody needed this to happen. Not now. Not fifty days before the most important election of his life.
But here we are.
Everyone Has Seen the Video
You know the one. Do not pretend you haven’t. The wedding reception. Kalpathi S. Suresh’s son’s big function in Chennai. March 5. Vijay and Trisha Krishnan stepping out of the same car, both in beige, both looking like they coordinated outfits that morning, which, let’s be honest, they clearly did.
The video went everywhere. WhatsApp groups. Instagram reels. Your mother forwarded it to you. Your office group chat argued about it for two hours. That video.
Now here is the thing. Vijay is a grown man. He can attend weddings with whoever he wants. That is not the issue. The issue is what was happening in the background when he made that choice.
His wife of 27 years, Sangeetha Sornalingam, the woman who was standing next to him when nobody had heard of him, when he was just another young actor hoping to catch a break, that woman had just filed a divorce petition in a Chennai family court. The petition reportedly says he was having an affair. With an actress. And then four days after that petition becomes front page news, he walks into a wedding hall with the actress everyone is already talking about, in matching outfits.
What exactly did he think was going to happen?
Before We Go Further
Some context. Because a lot of people are jumping straight to opinions without knowing the full timeline.
Vijay and Sangeetha got married in August 1999. Two kids, Jason Sanjay and Divya Saasha. Sangeetha was never a showbiz person. Never chased cameras. She came to events when she had to and stayed home when she didn’t. That was her way.
The first real sign that something was off came in 2023. Vijay launched Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, his political party. Big moment. Historic, actually, for Tamil cinema. But Sangeetha was not there. She skipped the launch. She skipped the events that followed. People noticed but said nothing out loud.
Sources now suggest the two had already been living separately for nearly two years before any court papers were filed. The petition itself was filed back in December 2025, not last week. It sat quietly in a family court file for two full months.
Then, the last week of February 2026, it leaked.
And the timing of that leak is where things get genuinely complicated.
The Leak Is Not Innocent
Nobody leaks a court document by accident. Especially not one filed under the Special Marriage Act involving the most famous man in Tamil Nadu, who is also fifty days away from contesting an election. Documents like that sit in court files and stay there unless someone with access decides they shouldn’t.
So who leaked it, and why then?
Vijay’s camp has a ready answer. They are calling it a conspiracy. In his Thanjavur speech on March 4, Vijay himself stood on stage and accused both the DMK and the AIADMK of working together quietly to destroy him before the votes happened. He said “mudslinging.” He said, “allegations after allegations.” His supporters online have been screaming the same thing every hour since.
Are they wrong? Not entirely.
Think about it this way. Sangeetha filed this petition in December. She is clearly not someone who wants media attention. She went to court quietly, through lawyers, said nothing to journalists, and gave no interviews. That is her pattern. So the leak almost certainly did not come from her side.
Somebody else found that filing and decided the public needed to see it right now, in late February 2026, and not in, say, October 2025 or March 2025. That somebody made a choice. And that choice benefits exactly one set of people, the parties who need Vijay’s image damaged before polling day.
That part is real. The political sabotage angle is not paranoia. It is a reasonable reading of what happened.
But.
Vijay Then Walked Straight Into the Trap
Even if every single conspiracy theory is correct, even if the DMK and AIADMK and three other parties all sat in a room and planned this together, Vijay still chose to get into that car with Trisha on March 5.
Nobody forced him to attend that wedding. Nobody forced him to coordinate outfits. Nobody forced him to arrive together in a single vehicle while his divorce petition was still hot news on every channel.
Some of his own supporters, the quieter, more honest ones, are saying exactly this in private. That someone in his inner circle is giving him genuinely terrible advice. That you do not hand your enemies a loaded weapon and then act surprised when they fire it.
A section of observers actually thinks the wedding appearance was deliberate. That Vijay made a calculated decision to get this out in the open now, on his own terms, so nobody can use it as a surprise bomb during peak campaigning in April or May. The thinking goes: better that Tamil Nadu absorbs this in March than deals with it as a fresh scandal in May.
That logic is not stupid. It is actually the kind of move a politically shrewd person might make.
But here is the problem with that logic. It assumes Tamil Nadu voters will process this the way a political strategist does. They won’t. They will process it the way a person does. With feeling.
What the Women in This State Are Actually Saying
Go to any residential area in Chennai right now. Any apartment complex common area, any market, any school gate at pickup time. Ask the women there what they think.
They are not talking about DMK conspiracies. They are talking about Sangeetha.
She stood by him for 27 years. She stayed out of the spotlight so his image could stay clean. She gave him the space to build a film career and then a political career and somewhere along the way, reportedly, she was left behind. And then she found out through whatever way wives find out, and she went to court, quietly, with lawyers, no drama. And now she is being trolled by fan clubs as a political pawn. A woman who asked for nothing except some dignity at the end of a long marriage.
The #WeStandWithSangeetha movement online is not manufactured. It is not opposition astroturfing. It is real women, many of them lifelong Vijay fans, who feel a specific kind of letdown that no political conspiracy theory can fully explain away.
That is the vote Vijay is actually at risk of losing. Not some abstract women’s bloc. The specific woman who put his face on her autorickshaw and cried at his screenings and believed the image he sold for three decades. She is reconsidering right now.
Trisha Has Said Nothing
Trisha Krishnan has been completely silent since this broke. No posts. No statement. No clarification.
Her old Instagram post from June 2025, wishing Vijay a happy birthday with a “Happy Birthday bestest” caption, has been screenshotted and shared about ten million times. Her old interviews where she talked about wanting to become Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu someday, have resurfaced. People are now seriously speculating about whether she will join TVK and campaign alongside him.
None of that is confirmed. None of it may happen. But the silence itself has become its own kind of news. Because when you attend a wedding in matching clothes with a married man whose wife is in court, staying silent is not neutral. It is a choice.
And Today of All Days
Today is Women’s Day.
Vijay is in Mamallapuram right now with a big TVK rally, expected to announce welfare schemes for women, holding up his party as the champion of women’s rights and dignity in Tamil Nadu.
Director Ameer came out this morning and asked the obvious question publicly. How do you stand on a stage for Women’s Day when your own wife is in a family court filing papers about how you treated her?
It is a fair question. Uncomfortable, but fair.
Tamil Nadu has always had this strange ability to separate the reel from the real when it comes to its film heroes turned politicians. MGR did things in his personal life that would end careers in other states. It did not matter. People worshipped him anyway. The lines between the hero onscreen and the man offscreen were always blurred here in a way that is unique to this state.
But Vijay built his brand differently. He was not just a hero. He was a good man. The honest man. The man who was going to clean up politics because he was not like the others. That specific promise, that specific brand of moral authority, is what is being stress-tested right now. And unlike MGR’s era, this is happening in 2026 with smartphones and live WhatsApp updates and women who vote in enormous numbers and have opinions they are not shy about sharing.
The Political Math
Here is the honest bottom line.
Political analysts who are not affiliated with any party are mostly saying this will not destroy Vijay’s electoral chances on its own. Divorce is not a disqualifier in Tamil Nadu’s political culture. Governance failures, corruption, caste politics, these are the things that genuinely move votes here. A messy personal life, on its own, probably does not.
But Vijay does not have a governance record to fall back on. He has not run a municipality, a district, or a department. His only credential, the entire reason people were excited about TVK, is the idea that he is different. That he stands for something cleaner. The divorce and everything that followed have put a dent in that idea. How big a dent, nobody knows yet.
The court hearing is on April 20. The election announcement is coming any day. Between now and polling day, there will be more hearings, possibly more leaks, possibly more videos, certainly more noise.
Vijay wanted to fight this election on his terms. Right now, he is fighting it on everyone else’s.
One Last Thing
Sangeetha still has not spoken.
Not to a single journalist. Not on social media. Not through any representative. She filed her papers and went quiet.
There is something in that silence that is louder than everything else happening around this story right now. Whatever the political angles, whatever the conspiracy theories, whatever the election strategy, there is a woman at the centre of all this who asked for her marriage back or asked to be let out of it cleanly, and instead got her private court papers leaked on the internet and turned into a political football.
Tamil Nadu is watching how Vijay handles the next few weeks.
But some of us are also watching how Tamil Nadu handles Sangeetha.
Stay ahead with Hindustan Herald — bringing you trusted news, sharp analysis, and stories that matter across Politics, Business, Technology, Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, and more.
Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, and join our Telegram community @hindustanherald for real-time updates.
Covers Indian politics, governance, and policy developments with over a decade of experience in political reporting.
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
- Ananya Sharmahttps://hindustanherald.in/authors/ananya/
