By Ananya Sharma 
Chennai, April 16: A week before an election is the worst possible time to get into an argument with your own ally. You would think that goes without saying. And yet, here we are.
Premalatha Vijayakant, the DMDK chief who is contesting from Virudhachalam this April 23, has spent the better part of the last few days doing exactly the kind of damage control that no candidate wants to be doing in the home stretch of a campaign. The woman who is supposed to be knocking on doors and asking people for votes has instead been on the phone with an alliance partner, speaking to journalists in Salem, and explaining why a controversy that everyone says did not happen, somehow still needed three rounds of public clarification to go away.
The partner she ended up in a tangle with was Thol. Thirumavalavan. VCK chief. One of the most recognised Dalit leaders the state has produced. A man whose support, particularly in the constituencies where Dalit voters are decisive, is not something any SPA candidate can afford to take lightly.
So yes. This mattered.
Go Back a Little. What is Virudhachalam to These People?
You cannot really understand the weight of this controversy without knowing what that constituency means to the DMDK as a party.
In 2006, Captain Vijayakant, the popular Tamil actor who founded the DMDK just a year before, did something fairly audacious. He decided to contest elections across all 234 Assembly seats in Tamil Nadu. No alliance, no support system, no deals cut with bigger parties. Just him and a brand new party that most political veterans probably laughed at behind closed doors.
It was a disaster, mostly. Almost every single DMDK candidate lost. But Vijayakant himself won. From Virudhachalam. That one seat out of 234 became the party’s founding story, the thing they tell new workers when they need to explain what the DMDK is built on.
Fast forward to 2026, and Premalatha has announced she will contest from that very seat. The same Virudhachalam where her late husband first proved the party was real. On top of that, her son, V. Vijaya Prabhakaran, is contesting from Virudhunagar. So it is a family election in the most literal sense. Two Vijayakants on two different ballots, carrying one name into this campaign.
All of that was the plan. Then the words happened.
Nobody Is Quite Saying What Was Said. Here Is What We Know.
The specifics of the original remark are genuinely hard to pin down, because by the time the cameras arrived, everyone was already busy explaining why there was nothing to explain. But here is what has become clear from the public statements made since.
At an alliance event, Thirumavalavan apparently announced Premalatha’s candidature from Virudhachalam himself. From the stage. The DMDK, from what has emerged, did not appreciate that. Their view was that an announcement like that, coming from within the SPA, should have been made by the alliance leader. By Chief Minister M.K. Stalin. Not by a constituent party chief, however prominent.
Thirumavalavan himself accepted this, more or less. While releasing the VCK election manifesto earlier this week, he said plainly that at the time of that announcement, it should have been CM Stalin making it, not him. He said he had only made a passing mention in his speech. He also made it very clear that he believed some people outside the alliance were working actively to blow this into something bigger than it was. He said there was no ill feeling among VCK workers. He was calm, and he was direct.
But here is the thing. When a party chief has to use his own manifesto launch to reassure journalists that he and his ally are not fighting, you already know the story is out there. Saying nothing happened does not mean nothing happened. It means something happened, and everyone decided to be adults about it, which is fine, but it is still something.
Premalatha Was Not Exactly Apologetic
When she faced reporters in Salem on Sunday, she was not soft about any of this.
She said the opposition was getting excited over nothing because they had no real dirt on the DMDK. She said leaders from other parties drove around in expensive cars and did far worse things without anyone scrutinising them the way her party was being scrutinised over a minor moment. She was sharp about that. She clearly felt her party was being held to a standard that nobody else in Tamil Nadu politics was being held to.
When it came to Thirumavalavan, though, she changed her register entirely. She said he had called her on the phone the same day the whole thing became news. She said the two of them go back a long way, that their friendship started during the time of Vijayakant himself, that this bond is not something that breaks over a campaign event. She said he would be coming to Virudhachalam to campaign for her before polling day.
That last bit is important. If Thirumavalavan actually shows up in Virudhachalam and campaigns for her, it draws a line under the whole episode in a way that no press statement can.
She also went after Edappadi K. Palaniswami quite directly, telling the AIADMK general secretary to maintain some basic decorum and look to his own party’s track record rather than poking his nose into SPA affairs. And she alleged that some of the administrative changes happening on the ground were not coincidental, that the machinery was being adjusted ahead of polling day in ways that were not accidental.
On the actual election result, she was as confident as she has been throughout the campaign. Over 200 seats for the alliance, she said. The voters will answer all of this.
First Time Together, Old Tensions
Something that tends to get buried in the day-to-day election noise is this: the DMDK and the DMK have never been formal allies before. Not in 2006, not in 2011 when the DMDK had its best-ever result under Vijayakant, not at any point in the party’s history.
The DMDK spent years inside the AIADMK’s coalition. Then it spent time floating independently. It held talks with everyone at various points. The formal handshake with the DMK only happened in February 2026, when Premalatha walked into Anna Arivalayam in Chennai and stood alongside M.K. Stalin to make it official.
She recalled something Kalaignar Karunanidhi said years ago, that the DMK-DMDK alliance was a ripe fruit waiting to fall into milk. It should have fallen in 2016. It did not. She said it had finally happened, though Vijayakant was not here to see it.
There was genuine feeling in that moment. Real sentiment. But sentiment does not teach two parties how to coordinate a press release or agree on who announces what from which stage. That kind of coordination comes from years of working together. These two parties do not have those years yet. They are learning as they go, in the middle of an election, with journalists watching every move.
That is the real context behind what happened in Virudhachalam. It was not a betrayal. It was not a conspiracy. It was two organisations that have never worked together before, stumbling over each other’s unspoken rules.
One more thing worth knowing. A big part of why Premalatha moved toward the DMK in the first place was that the AIADMK cut the DMDK out of a Rajya Sabha berth in their previous alliance. That stung. The DMK, reportedly, has promised a Rajya Sabha seat for the DMDK, to be announced by CM Stalin when the time is right. That is a real stake. That is what keeps both sides invested in making this alliance work.
Thirumavalavan’s Calculation
Here is a detail that changes how you read all of this. Thirumavalavan is not even contesting the 2026 elections himself. He has stepped aside from Kattumannarkoil, the seat he held for years, and has put forward Jyothimani to fight in his place.
A man who is not personally on the ballot thinks differently about these things. He is not protecting his own count. He is protecting the alliance, protecting the VCK’s candidates, and protecting the larger SPA project of stopping the AIADMK-BJP from coming back to power. Letting a row over a stage announcement spiral into something damaging would hurt all three of those goals. So he shut it down fast. Phone call, public statement, done.
That is not weakness. That is someone who knows what he is actually there to do.
One Week Out and Premalatha Cannot Afford Any More of This
She goes into the final days of this campaign with real pressure on her. Virudhachalam is symbolic, and that is both its power and its risk. If she wins there, she carries her husband’s legacy forward in the most powerful way possible. If she does not, the loss will be described in terms that go beyond a single-seat defeat.
The last thing she needed was a controversy about her own alliance to be the thing people were talking about instead of her campaign. But that is what happened. And for a few days, the opposition had a free story. The kind of story they never would have been able to invent on their own.
It looks contained now. Thirumavalavan said his piece. She said hers. He is reportedly going to campaign for her. The alliance is holding, at least outwardly.
Tamil Nadu votes on April 23. It will answer everything.
But somewhere in the DMDK campaign office, someone is probably still thinking about those few words that started all of this. Wondering how a sentence or two, spoken without thinking at a campaign event, nearly undid weeks of careful political work.
That is politics. Sometimes the most dangerous thing in the room is an open microphone.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
