By Ananya Sharma 
Chennai, April 15: Vijay was never supposed to be a politician. That was the running joke in Tamil Nadu for years. Every election season, someone would start the rumour. “Thalapathy is entering politics.” It would spread like wildfire through WhatsApp groups, auto-rickshaw conversations, and tea shop debates. And every single time, nothing would happen. He would release a film, the crowds would go mad, and life would go on.
So when he actually did it, a lot of people did not believe it at first. Even now, with eight days to go before Tamil Nadu votes, some people half-expect this to turn out to be an elaborate publicity stunt for some film nobody has heard about yet.
It is not a stunt. The man is on the ballot. In two constituencies. And his party is fighting all 234 seats in this election. Alone.
That last part is worth sitting with for a moment. No alliance. No big brother party to share the load. Just TVK, its candidates, and whatever Vijay’s name is worth at the voting booth.
Nobody Was Really Watching, and Then Suddenly Everyone Was
The story of how Vijay got here does not start in 2024 when he formally launched TVK. It starts much earlier, in the quiet, unglamorous world of fan club politics.
His fan association, Vijay Makkal Iyakkam, had been doing community work across Tamil Nadu for over a decade. Blood donation drives. Relief work during floods and cyclones. The kind of thing that gets a small mention in the local pages and then gets forgotten. But it was building something. Goodwill. Presence. Organisation.
In 2021, that organisation decided to test itself. The fan clubs put up candidates in 169 local body seats across Tamil Nadu. They won 115 of them. That is a 68 percent strike rate, in their very first electoral outing, against established local politicians with years of experience and caste networks built over generations.
Suddenly, nobody was dismissing Vijay Makkal Iyakkam as a bunch of fans who liked watching movies.
TVK as a party came on February 2, 2024. Vijay announced it, named himself president, and immediately made clear this was not going to be a polite, play-it-safe kind of party. He called out the DMK for what he described as corruption and treating politics like a family business. He called the BJP an ideological adversary. Both parties responded the way parties respond when they are genuinely concerned, by pretending not to be concerned while quietly working much harder on the ground.
By early 2025, TVK was building out a network of over 70,000 booth-level workers across the state. Booth agents are the foot soldiers of Indian elections. They know every voter in their area personally. They remind people to vote, help the elderly get to polling stations, and track who has voted and who has not. Building 70,000 of them in under a year is not something you do casually. That takes money, coordination, and the belief that you are actually going to fight this election seriously.
The Call That Surprised Everyone
March 18, 2026. Vijay gets on stage and tells Tamil Nadu that TVK is going it alone. All 234 seats. No partners. No deal with anyone.
Jaws dropped. Not because it was unthinkable, but because most people assumed Vijay would play it safer. Form a small alliance, protect a few seats, and give himself a cushion. That is what most new parties do.
He did the opposite.
The reasoning, if you listen to what TVK leaders have been saying, goes something like this. The whole point of TVK is that it is different from the old parties. The moment you ally with one of them, even for convenience, you start looking like more of the same. Voters who are tired of the DMK and AIADMK are not going to enthusiastically support a party that just got into bed with one of them.
Fair enough. But going alone has a very specific risk in Tamil Nadu’s election system. If TVK ends up pulling, say, 15,000 votes in a constituency where the margin between the DMK and AIADMK candidates is 8,000, TVK has effectively decided the winner without winning anything itself. Do that across dozens of seats and you become the most influential party in the election despite winning nothing. Or you become the party that handed power to someone you were trying to defeat. It can go either way.
Vijay himself chose to contest from Perambur in North Chennai and Trichy East. Both seats are with DMK right now. The Perambur MLA, RD Sekar, won last time by about 55,000 votes. Not a close race. A demolition. Vijay is walking into that as a first-time candidate.
He does not seem to lose sleep over it. At the event where he announced all the candidates, he said something that stuck with people. He told the crowd that TVK’s people are not heavyweights, not the usual connected, moneyed political types. Just ordinary people who want to serve. “Vote for whistle,” he said, holding up the party symbol. “It is a whistle revolution election.”
The crowd roared. Whether roars become votes is the question.
What He Is Actually Promising People
The manifesto TVK released is not small. It is not a list of vague aspirations dressed up in political language. It is specific, and some of it is very expensive.
For women, Vijay has promised monthly cash support, free cooking gas, free rides on government buses, a gold chain and silk saree for brides from poor families, and a gold ring with a welcome kit for every newborn. These are not symbolic gestures. These are things that cost real money and require real administrative machinery to deliver.
For young people, the promises include guaranteed employment, loans without collateral for studying and starting businesses, and monthly financial help for students still in college. He has also made a big deal about tackling the drug problem, promising what he calls anti-drug protection zones. This is something that hits home hard in working-class Tamil Nadu, where cheap drugs have been hollowing out entire neighbourhoods for years. It is not an abstract policy issue for many of the people TVK is trying to reach. It is personal.
Will he be able to deliver all of this if TVK wins? That is a very different question. Critics, mostly from the DMK side, love pointing out that Vijay has never governed anything. The jump from making promises to actually running a state is enormous, and history is full of politicians who meant well and still could not manage it.
But the people TVK is speaking to have been hearing DMK and AIADMK promises for decades. Those parties have governed. They have experience. And yet many of the people Vijay is standing in front of are still waiting for their lives to improve in ways that matter. So when a new face shows up with big promises, the instinct of many voters is not scepticism. It is cautious hope. Which is actually a very rational response to the situation they are in.
The Part Nobody Is Explaining Properly
Here is something that gets buried in the horse-race coverage of this election. TVK does not need to win a majority to shake everything up.
In the last Tamil Nadu election, there were 127 constituencies where the total votes polled by smaller parties added up to more than the winning margin. One hundred and twenty-seven out of two hundred and thirty-four. What that means for ordinary voters trying to understand this election is simple. In more than half the seats in Tamil Nadu, if a third party takes votes away from either of the two big blocs, it changes who wins. The third party does not win those seats. But it decides who does.
TVK is that third party right now. If it gets even ten per cent of the total vote and that vote is spread across enough constituencies, it could flip dozens of results without winning a single one. Both the DMK and the AIADMK understand this perfectly. It explains why they keep calling TVK irrelevant in public and then spending enormous energy campaigning against it on the ground. You do not fight that hard against something you genuinely think does not matter.
The Rallies That Got Cancelled
Not everything has gone according to plan.
In the last week or so, TVK has cancelled several campaign events where Vijay was supposed to appear. Some of these were in constituencies he is not even contesting, just showing up to support a candidate. Permissions had been granted. Stages had been booked. And then, cancelled.
The party says this is about crowd safety. After a stampede in Karur at a public event injured several people, Vijay has apparently been reluctant to let huge, uncontrolled gatherings build up around him. Given how these things can spiral, that is not an unreasonable concern. When you are Vijay, even a routine campaign stop can attract a lakh people if the word gets out. Managing that in a way that does not end in tragedy requires planning and caution.
Opposition parties are not being charitable about it. They have been putting out statements mocking what they call his disappearing act. Suggesting he is nervous. Suggesting the crowds are not actually coming. TVK has pushed back, saying the campaign will intensify in the final days before canvassing closes on April 21. On April 15, Vijay got clearance from Chennai police to campaign in multiple areas of the city, including T Nagar, though with a cap on how many people could attend each stop.
The cancelled rallies matter only if TVK’s organisation cannot compensate. If those 70,000 booth workers are actually doing their jobs, physically meeting voters, making the case door to door, then Vijay’s personal presence at every event becomes less critical. If the organisation is weaker than it looks on paper, the cancellations will hurt.
The MGR Comparison Will Not Go Away
Every single piece written about Vijay’s political entry mentions MGR. Every. Single. One. Including this one, because there is no honest way to avoid it.
MG Ramachandran went from being Tamil Nadu’s most beloved film star to its most powerful politician. He built a party, ADMK, eventually becoming chief minister and holding the job until he died. His face is still on walls across the state. That is the template people reach for when they try to understand what Vijay is doing.
The comparison works up to a point. The emotional connection between a Tamil film hero and the mass public, particularly among working-class and rural voters, is real and deep in ways that are hard to explain if you have not grown up inside it. These are not just favourite actors. They are figures of identification, aspiration, and loyalty that cross into something almost familial. Vijay has that. The crowds at his events are not there for policy. They are there for him.
But MGR built his political career from within an established party before breaking away. He did not start from scratch. And he operated in a world without smartphones, social media, 24-hour news channels, and the kind of constant scrutiny that means every weak moment gets clipped into a video and shared a million times before lunch. Vijay is doing this under conditions MGR never faced.
What Vijay has that most professional politicians would trade a great deal for is the ability to fill a ground in minutes. In a state where politics has always involved a degree of theatre and spectacle, that matters more than outsiders sometimes realise.
Now We Wait
April 23. That is when Tamil Nadu votes. May 4 is when the counting happens, and the results come in.
By May 4, the questions will have answers. How many seats did TVK win? Did Vijay himself win Perambur, against a sitting MLA who last won by 55,000 votes? Did the whistle revolution turn into actual assembly seats or did it stall at the first real test?
Whatever happens, one thing is already done. Tamil Nadu politics as it existed before February 2024, is gone. The two-alliance system that has governed this state for decades now has a genuine third force pushing at it. Maybe TVK wins big. Maybe it wins a handful. Maybe it wins nothing and has to regroup for the next cycle.
But it is here. And the people running the old parties know it.
Eight days. Then Tamil Nadu speaks.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
