(As Tamil Nadu gears up for the Assembly polls, every Thursday, Arun Janardhanan decodes the electoral trends, political signals, and campaign moves shaping the contest.)
The coming Tamil Nadu Assembly elections may not be measured in decibels – not in vans with loudspeakers, cut-outs of leaders taller than coconut trees, rows of plastic chairs on a dusty ground, or how far a leader’s voice could travel without a microphone.
Today, they are measured in reels. In how many phones rise together when a leader’s convoy passes by, in how fast a speech becomes a meme, and in who trends before lunch. If earlier the medium was the message, in 2026, it is the phone. This means the message is whatever content one can squeeze into 20 seconds and a vertical frame. Call it the “Instagram election”.
For decades, Tamil Nadu politics ran on arithmetic. Add allies, transfer of votes, secure booths, count caste clusters, and distribute payments in cash or tokens to be used at the local grocery shops. The DMK and the AIADMK perfected this science. Later, the BJP put its machinery onto it.
Seat-sharing charts, district in-charges, zonal observers, and war rooms. But outside these rooms, something else transpires.
Crowds are not just gathering to listen. They come to see, record, and post. To prove they were there. At a typical rally of superstar Vijay, the Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) chief, many in the crowd barely face the leader perched on top of the campaign vehicle. They face themselves. Arms stretched, phones up, the sea of heads behind them. The leader isn’t always in the frame, the moment is. Attendance has become content. Presence has become proof.
Call it a new mode of “being-in-the-world” or simply call it “going viral”. Earlier, you went to a rally to see a leader. Now you go to be seen seeing the leader. The camera has flipped. Politics has become a participatory spectacle. Leaders have begun pacing the stage like runway models, turning left and right, offering their “best side” to the crowd’s phones.
It is easy to dismiss this as a youth distraction. But it is something deeper – and more expensive. Election campaigning has quietly migrated from newspaper advertisements and magazine profiles to YouTube channels and influencer feeds. Earlier, parties paid several lakhs for a front-page advertisement in a daily. Now, that money flows to YouTubers. Earlier, magazine reporters were courted to write soft-focus interviews: the leader at home, the grandchildren on the sofa, a veteran leader with his pet dog – the human side. Today, that job belongs to vloggers with ring lights. Local MLAs are inviting local influencers to their offices. A food vlogger can be seen recording a video about the delicacies served at an MLA’s office. “A day with a leader”. “Morning routine of a minister”. “Leader as a farmer”.
The difference is scale. Payments are pegged to subscribers and followers. If you have three million followers and a convincing talking head, you are not just an influencer – you can even become a state leader. Ask Felix Gerald, the YouTuber absorbed into Vijay’s party’s top post recently.
It also seems to be triggering an existential crisis among conventional media professionals – many are setting up ring lights in their bedrooms, waiting for late-night debate calls, performing outrage on cue and picking sides, hoping less to inform the audience than to be noticed by a leader who might be watching.
A new ecosystem
This is not volunteer enthusiasm but an industry. The DMK has over 100 YouTubers working for it. The AIADMK has over 80, and the BJP has 100-plus, on par with the DMK. Mainstream parties are spending Rs 5 crore to Rs 10 crore a month in Tamil Nadu, on average, paying these digital faces.
The BJP’s grid is tighter than ever. It has a strong presence not just online but also across conventional Tamil news channels, despite being branded a “non-Tamil” party.
Vijay, by contrast, feels like an event – a matter of concern for older parties. And in an age of feeds, events travel faster than institutions.
This has created a new ecosystem in politics, something like a cottage industry. Every MLA. Every minister. Every ticket aspirant. Each with a social media team of two to ten members at least. Parallel to them are official strategy firms, sometimes 500 workers statewide, running surveys, sensing ground pulse, packaging narratives, occasionally, carrying political funds too in bags.
What influencers do
In this Instagram election, the work is precise for influencers and accounts. Do surveys. Set a narrative. Build a positive image. If TV anchors once got discreetly paid for constituency “reviews,” now the transaction has moved to thumbnails and analytics dashboards. Sometimes it backfires.
When veteran AIADMK leader Sengottaiyan, who recently joined Vijay’s TVK, tried to present himself as a humble farmer cultivating 150 acres in a YouTube video a week ago, the intention was soft. But it backfired soon, with locals in his native town beginning to ask on social media how he acquired that much land. Authenticity is a dangerous prop.
Seasoned leaders like CM M K Stalin and AIADMK chief Edappadi K Palaniswami, known for being conventional and disciplined, still speak the language of structure. Even though their Instagram or social media pages boast of lakhs of followers, many may not have actually seen their own profiles, which are handled by their dutiful administrators. These leaders remain largely untouched by the ritual of scrolling reels, too. WhatsApp may be their maximum social-media exposure. And they continue to run the system like a factory that never shuts down – field candidates, negotiate alliances, solve disputes and count votes.
But it just doesn’t trend. So strategists step in to soften their edges, add filters, groom them into something called “new,” turning politics into a managed visual product rather than lived leadership. The old parties which talked in paragraphs are now trying to speak in seconds. Seconds win.
That “fear of missing out” has entered politics too, among the party cadres and well-wishers. If everyone you know posted from a rally and you didn’t go, you feel like you missed out on a piece of history. So crowds grow. That makes a rally no longer just a meeting but an experience too. A backdrop. A filter.
Or maybe the sociology here is subtle. Step into a Chennai suburban coach or a government passenger bus at night. Half the passengers are scrolling, headphones in. Politics enters that same private space not through manifestos but through clips. A 20-second punchline. A meme. A dance. Meaning shrinks. Emotion grows.
In this election, what seems to matter first is not policy but packaging. Not administration but amplification. Not work done on the ground but work done on screen. Governance has quietly slipped to second place. Almost every party now appears to believe that managing social media matters more than what they have done or failed to do. Control the frame, flood the feed, shape perception.
Win the screen first; the votes, they assume, will follow. Whatever political that happens along the way, that’s a bonus.