By Ananya Sharma 
Chennai, April 8: Velachery has a flooding problem. Has had one for years. Every time it rains, not even heavily, just normally, the water comes up, and the streets go under. People who live there know this. They have known it for a long time. And on Tuesday, Edappadi K. Palaniswami knew it too.
Tamil Nadu Election 2026
The AIADMK general secretary chose Velachery for a reason. He stood in front of a crowd there and said what he has been saying for months now, just louder this time: MK Stalin needs to go. “This election is one where Stalin should be thrown out of government,” he told supporters. The crowd liked that. They were always going to like that. But the more interesting question is whether the people standing in front of him actually believe things will be different if EPS wins. That is the bet the AIADMK is making with fifteen days left.
This Is Not a Simple Two-Party Race Anymore
For a long time, Tamil Nadu elections worked like clockwork. DMK wins, AIADMK waits. AIADMK wins, DMK waits. Back and forth, decade after decade. Voters knew the script. Parties knew the script. Everyone showed up and played their part.
That script is gone now.
A film actor who goes by the name Vijay decided two years ago that he wanted to be in politics. He started a party called Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, TVK for short. He announced he would contest all 234 seats alone. No alliance, no compromise, no deal with either side. People thought he was being dramatic. He was not. The candidate lists are out. He is personally contesting from Perambur in Chennai and Tiruchirappalli East. His party workers are out across the state.
Nobody quite knows what to do with him.
What EPS Said and What He Did Not Say
Back to Tuesday. Palaniswami covered a lot of ground in Velachery. He talked about women’s safety. He said law and order in Tamil Nadu is at its worst in five years. He accused DMK party workers of walking into shops and hotels and not paying. Small allegation, but the kind that resonates with traders who have their own stories to tell.
What EPS is good at, and he is genuinely good at this, is making governance failure feel personal. The stormwater drain that never got built is not just a civic complaint when he says it. It becomes evidence of a government that does not care. Whether that framing holds up against DMK’s counter-argument is another matter entirely.
His Chennai blitz is two days long and deliberately targeted. Middle-class neighbourhoods, women voters, young people. These are the swing constituencies where the AIADMK lost badly in 2021 and needs to recover if it wants any chance of forming a government.
Stalin Was in Cuddalore, and He Was Not Holding Back
Same day, different stage. Chief Minister MK Stalin held a rally at the Manjakuppam ground in Cuddalore and went straight at EPS.
He said Palaniswami joined the BJP to hide his own failures. He said the AIADMK is no longer a Dravidian party in any meaningful sense. He gave it a new name, “Amit Shah Munnetra Kazhagam” and let the crowd chew on that for a while.
In Tamil Nadu, that kind of tagging is not just an insult. It is a serious political weapon. People here have a gut-level suspicion of anything that feels like Delhi telling Tamil Nadu what to do. The Dravidian movement was built on exactly that resistance. When Stalin calls the AIADMK a “Sangh organisation,” he is not just scoring points in a debate. He is trying to make the act of voting for AIADMK feel wrong to a certain kind of Tamil voter.
Stalin also defended his government’s record. He said the state’s growth rate climbed from 0.07 per cent to 11.19 per cent under the DMK. The opposition disputes that figure. But he said it clearly, and he said it to a large crowd, and that matters in an election campaign regardless of what the fact-checkers say later.
He also played the fear card plainly. If the NDA comes to power, he told voters, free electricity will go. The free bus rides for women will go. Five years of welfare work, undone. Vote accordingly.
The Alliance Story, Which Actually Matters
The AIADMK and BJP are together again. That sentence needs some context because the reunion was not exactly warm.
In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the two parties went their separate ways. They contested independently across Tamil Nadu and, between them, won not a single seat. Zero. After results like that, old arguments have a way of becoming less important. By April 2025, the alliance was back on. Palaniswami was named the chief ministerial candidate. The PMK came in after that, bringing its strong base among the Vanniyar community in northern constituencies. TTV Dhinakaran’s AMMK joined too. By late March, the seat-sharing math was settled: BJP contests 27 seats, PMK takes 18, AMMK gets 11.
The manifesto EPS released has 297 promises in it. The one that stands out is a monthly payment of Rs 2,000 going directly to women who head ration card households. Not to the household. To the woman herself, into her own bank account. In Tamil Nadu, where women turn out to vote in very large numbers, that distinction will be noticed.
Vijay: The Part Nobody Can Predict
TVK is fighting all 234 seats alone, and Vijay has been personally campaigning, though his schedule has run into trouble. His Chennai rallies for April 6 and 7 were cancelled, his party says, and police kept adding conditions that made the events impossible to hold. Tuesday’s plans took him to Tirunelveli and Tuticorin instead, though even there the final locations were not confirmed because the permissions had not come through yet.
Some of his local candidates have started using large Vijay cutouts to campaign on his behalf in areas he cannot reach. That tells you something about how the ground operation is working, and how much the whole project depends on his personal appeal.
There is also the Karur matter. In September last year, a stampede at one of his rallies killed 41 people. The Supreme Court ordered a CBI investigation. Vijay was questioned. It has not destroyed his campaign, but it has not gone away either. Voters will factor it in how they choose to factor it in.
Analysts who study Tamil Nadu elections figure TVK might pull around 15 per cent of the total vote. The problem with 15 per cent spread across 234 seats is that it may not win a single constituency in a first-past-the-post system. But here is the thing, even if Vijay ends up with no seats on May 4, his voters came from somewhere. They came from the DMK’s column, or from the AIADMK’s column, or from people who would not have voted at all. Any of those outcomes changes which party forms the government.
That is why both Stalin and EPS are spending as much energy attacking Vijay as they are attacking each other.
The Numbers Behind the Noise
Tamil Nadu has 5.67 crore voters. About 12.51 lakh of them have never voted before. Close to 2.28 crore voters are between 20 and 40. That age group alone is 40 per cent of the electorate. Every party in this race is trying to talk to those people.
The DMK goes in with incumbency, a full coalition, and five years of welfare schemes it is daring the opposition to promise to reverse. The AIADMK goes in with a reunited alliance, a leader who is genuinely from a working-class background and never lets anyone forget it, and a manifesto built around direct cash transfers. Vijay goes in with a party that is two years old, a fan base that has waited for exactly this moment, and a campaign that social media is carrying further than any ground operation could.
April 23 is the day Tamil Nadu actually answers the question all of this is circling. Counting starts May 4. Until then, every party is going to tell you they have it figured out.
None of them do.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
