By Ananya Sharma 
Chennai, April 9: Nobody really expected Perambur to become the most talked-about constituency in this entire Tamil Nadu election cycle. It is not the biggest seat. It is not the flashiest. But here we are, and the reason, as everyone already knows, is one man with a whistle symbol and roughly Rs 630 crore to his name.
Thalapathy Vijay showed up at Dr Ambedkar Government Arts College in Vyasarpadi on March 30 to file his nomination papers, and what followed was less a political formality and more a full-scale public event. Thousands turned up. He got on an open-top vehicle, grabbed the mic, and asked the crowd whether they wanted to keep the DMK or throw them out. The crowd’s answer was predictable. Whether the voters of Perambur feel the same way on April 23 is a very different question.
This Seat Was Never Going to Be Simple
Perambur is old DMK territory. Railway workers, industrial labour, north Chennai’s working-class backbone, this is the kind of place where people vote for parties that have been with them for thirty, forty years. The DMK has won here six times since 1977. The CPI took it three times in that same stretch. The AIADMK, despite being the dominant force in Tamil Nadu politics for large stretches, could never quite crack it.
In 2021, sitting MLA R.D. Sekar won by nearly 55,000 votes. That is not a gap. That is a wall.
So when Vijay, a first-time politician, a two-year-old party, and zero legislative experience, decided this was where he wanted to make his debut, people had questions. The TVK’s answer, essentially, was that this election is not about experience. It is about momentum, about a generation that is done with the old parties, and about a candidate so famous that normal electoral calculus does not apply to him.
Maybe. We will find out in a few weeks.
Then the Affidavit Mess Happened
Here is where things got complicated, and frankly, a little embarrassing for the TVK camp.
Vijay filed his Perambur nomination on March 30. In his affidavit, he said cleanly, formally, that no criminal cases were pending against him. Fine. Two days later, he went to Tiruchirappalli to file for his second constituency, Tiruchirappalli East. And in that affidavit, he declared two pending criminal cases.
Two different affidavits. Two different answers to the same question. Filed by the same person within 48 hours.
The internet, as you can imagine, had a field day.
One of those cases, FIR No. 108 of 2025, goes back to August 21, 2025. It was filed at Koodakovil Police Station in Madurai after a man complained that Vijay’s bouncers threw him off a seven-foot ramp during a TVK conference. The guy said he had climbed onto the stage out of excitement when Vijay was doing a ramp walk, and the bouncers pushed him down, causing chest and internal injuries. Vijay’s revised affidavit noted he had not received any formal summons in this matter.
The second case, FIR No. 74 of 2026, was filed at K5 Peravallur Police Station in Chennai and relates to an alleged public disturbance during his very own nomination rally in Perambur on March 30. Vijay said he only found out about this case through social media on April 2. This is a sentence that sums up a lot about how modern politics works.
Now, under the election law, this is not a small thing. Section 125A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 is quite clear; giving false or incomplete information in a nomination affidavit can mean up to six months in jail, a fine, or both. And more immediately, it can get your nomination thrown out. Legal voices across Tamil Nadu’s media were quick to point this out.
The TVK moved without wasting time. On April 4, a revised affidavit for Perambur was submitted, notarised on April 3, filed by party representatives and lawyers, bringing the Perambur disclosure in line with what was declared for Trichy East. They also quietly fixed another issue: Vijay’s age had somehow been listed as 52 in Perambur and 51 in Trichy. That too was corrected.
Scrutiny Day PMK Objects, RO Dismisses
April 7 was nomination scrutiny day, and PMK’s Poet M. Thilagabama, the party’s candidate for Perambur, did not hold back. She raised a formal objection, telling the Returning Officer that Vijay owed unpaid property taxes and that his affidavit had problems. The DMK also raised questions.
The Returning Officer heard everyone out and accepted the nomination anyway. “Those raising objections must submit supporting evidence for their allegations,” the RO said, according to DT Next. Vijay’s Trichy East papers were also cleared. The crisis, such as it was, ended without the scalp his opponents were looking for.
But the episode will follow the TVK into the campaign. When you present yourself as a clean break from the old corrupt ways of doing politics, getting caught in an affidavit discrepancy, however fixable, is the kind of story your opponents will not let die quietly.
Rs 630 Crore and a Working-Class Constituency
Let us talk about what else was in that affidavit, because the numbers are something.
Vijay declared movable assets of about Rs 410.59 crore, including gold jewellery worth over Rs 1.20 crore, silver worth Rs 15 lakh, and other holdings. Immovable properties in Neelankarai and Saligramam are valued at around Rs 220 crore at current market rates. Total income for 2024-25: Rs 184.53 crore. Pending income tax demands: Rs 3.44 crore.
This is a man with more money than most Tamil Nadu governments allocate to several district budgets. And he is standing for election in a constituency where factory workers, autorickshaw drivers, and railway employees form the bulk of the electorate.
Nobody is saying that disqualifies him. Rajiv Gandhi was not a farmer either. But the distance between a candidate’s life and a constituency’s reality does matter in how people feel on voting day. Perambur’s voters have seen promises before. They tend to ask what you actually know about their lives, not just what you feel about the DMK.
Vijay’s answer on nomination day was to go hard on civic grievances no basic amenities, no safety for women, drugs flooding the streets, and a government that loots while people struggle. He alleged Rs 1,000 crore in corruption at the state-run liquor corporation TASMAC. He referenced the Karur stampede of September 2025, where 41 people died at a TVK rally, calling it a conspiracy and saying he wanted justice too.
Whether voters in Perambur find that convincing is the real question nobody can answer yet.
Why the NDA Handed This Seat to PMK
When the AIADMK-led NDA announced its seat-sharing deal in late March, one detail stood out to political watchers. The AIADMK, which leads the alliance and is contesting 169 seats itself, chose not to contest Perambur directly. Instead, it handed the constituency to the PMK.
Read that again slowly, because it is telling. The main opposition party, which wants to form the government, decided not to field its own candidate against a debutant actor-politician in a high-profile constituency. As The Federal reported, this is widely interpreted as the AIADMK calculating that a direct loss to Vijay in Perambur would be more damaging than ceding the fight to an ally.
So Poet M. Thilagabama carries the NDA flag here, under the PMK banner. She is a credible candidate with literary standing, and she raised objections to Vijay’s affidavit with enough teeth to make news. But the PMK’s real Tamil Nadu base is in the Vanniyar community heartlands, rural constituencies in the northern districts, not the dense urban heart of north Chennai.
This is not a natural PMK ground. The party knows it. The AIADMK knows it too. The seat was offered partly to give the PMK a Chennai presence and partly because nobody in the NDA wanted the headline “AIADMK loses to Vijay in Perambur.”
Meanwhile, PMK’s own 18-seat list has its own story to tell. Dr Sowmiya Anbumani, wife of party chief Anbumani Ramadoss, is contesting from Dharmapuri, the family’s political heartland. The party’s leadership is clearly using this election to consolidate internally, especially after the ugly split in late 2025 when the PMK fractured into two factions, one backing Anbumani and one backing his father, Dr S. Ramadoss.
Perambur Has Over Two Lakh Voters. More Women Than Men.
One thing that often gets glossed over in the coverage of Perambur as “Vijay’s seat” is that it has 2,22,792 registered voters. Women 1,14,726 of them outnumber men by a clear margin. That is not a trivial number, and it shapes how all three campaigns are pitching their messages.
The DMK’s R.D. Sekar is the incumbent, well-known locally, with five years of MLA-level access to welfare schemes and government delivery to point to. In Tamil Nadu elections, the sitting MLA’s ability to claim credit for welfare programmes, ration, housing, and health insurance is a real and durable advantage.
Vijay is the challenger with the crowd pull. The TMK is trying to make a point.
All three camps are spending heavily. All three know that this result will be watched nationally.
The Two-Seat Strategy Tells You Something
It is worth noting that Vijay is contesting from both Perambur and Tiruchirappalli East. Election rules allow a candidate to contest for two seats simultaneously and withdraw from one if they win both. What it signals politically is that the TVK is not fully confident about either seat on its own.
Trichy East has a different voter composition. Some TVK watchers privately believe it may actually be the more winnable of the two. If Vijay loses Perambur but wins Trichy East, he is still in the assembly. The star-studded Perambur campaign may be more about optics and positioning TVK as a national-level disruption than about the genuine belief that the seat is there for the taking.
That could be wrong. Upsets happen. First-time candidates with massive public recognition have broken old political fortresses before. But in Tamil Nadu, where ground-level party organisation, caste arithmetic, and welfare delivery all factor into results alongside the excitement of a campaign betting against 55,000-vote incumbency margins is a high-risk move.
What Happens on May 4
Tamil Nadu votes on April 23. Results come on May 4. Perambur will be one of the first results people reach for on that morning, because it is the simplest possible test of what TVK actually represents beyond rallies, affidavits, and whistle symbols.
If Vijay wins even by a small margin, it confirms that something genuinely new is happening in Tamil Nadu politics. If Sekar holds on, it tells a different story: that Dravidian ground organisation, built over decades, does not crumble for a two-year-old party even when the candidate is one of the most famous people in the country.
Either outcome will define how seriously the rest of Indian politics takes the TVK model going forward.
For now, north Chennai is watching. And for once, so is the rest of India.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
