(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.)
Tamil Nadu, where the Assembly elections are just a few months away, already has four neat columns on paper. The ruling DMK alliance, the largest one that has been winning since 2019; the AIADMK–BJP combine; Tamil nationalist Seeman’s Naam Tamilar Katchi (NTK); and the outlier: actor Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, or TVK. The first three are familiar machines — parties with booth agents, caste arithmetic, and decades of muscle memory — while the fourth is a recent phenomenon.
According to many independent assessments, the TVK could get a 15-20% vote share — an astonishing number for a party that is barely structured — if roughly a quarter of NTK voters drift towards Vijay. But it is also dependent on Dalit leader Thol Thirumavalavan MP’s VCK and S Ramadoss’s Vanniyar-based (the largest OBC community) PMK losing votes to Vijay in northern Tamil Nadu. Even the two giants, DMK and AIADMK, are bracing for dents.\
Minority voters complicate the math further. Muslims are likely to largely stay with the DMK, while a substantial chunk of Christian voters may lean towards the superstar. Add first-time voters and young, urban men who live on Instagram and reels to this, and the numbers being bandied about the TVK do not seem that far-fetched.
However, the party is not without its challenges, which may very well puncture this promising scenario. The party finds itself scrambling for allies and its leaders are uneasy as Vijay appears to rely largely on his ready-made fan base and a circle of advisers who are already speaking of him as a Chief Minister-in-waiting.
However, for the first time in years, the Dravidian duopoly senses something it cannot easily classify. Not a rival, not an ideology, not even a party. A mood?
The puzzle for the DMK
Publicly, DMK sympathisers describe Chief Minister M K Stalin’s response to the stampede at Vijay’s rally in Karur last September as “mature.” He refused to engage. He was hesitant to trade barbs. He carried on with his job.
But privately, there is unease. The DMK knows how to fight the AIADMK. It knows how to fight the BJP. What it does not know how to fight is a crowd that behaves as if it is in a movie, not politics.
When AIADMK leader and former CM Edappadi K Palaniswami’s supporters allegedly manhandled the staff of ambulances in Vellore and Tiruchy last year for allegedly disturbing his rallies, the state moved quickly: complaints, FIRs, arrests. The script was familiar.
But a different script followed after Karur. TVK functionaries named in complaints remain untouched. The response feels hesitant, almost puzzled. “This is not like fighting another party. This is something else,” a senior DMK leader admitted to me in the weeks after the stampede.
Why do they come?
To watch a conventional politician speak, people arrive late, listen, and leave. To watch Vijay, they arrive at dawn.
Media scholar Dr Gopalan Ravindran offered a sharp distinction: the relationship between the cadre and the leader is public, while the relationship between a fan and the star is psychological. “When that becomes abnormal, it spills into public space,” he says. That probably is what Vijay is hoping to benefit from.
Cinema creates what he calls an “absence–presence logic.” Vijay the superstar does not first arrive as ideology. He arrives as memory, as a habit, something already woven into one’s sense of time. In that sense, the unprecedented crowds at Vijay’s rallies are not entirely irrational.
Unlike other equally gigantic Tamil superstars, Rajinikanth or Ajith, who deliberately appear ordinary in public, Vijay keeps his distance — limited access, controlled sightings, heavy security. More character than citizen. The distance feeds the desire.
If you step back a century, the frenzy makes sense. In 1896 or 1897, one of Madras’s first film screenings at Victoria Hall drew crowds who barely watched the screen. Film historian Stephen Hughes wrote that many stared instead at the chandelier, the ceiling, the strangeness of the hall itself. They bought groundnuts, drank soda at Jaffar’s shop near the Anna statue, and wandered the streets. The movie was only one stop in a small chain of freedoms. The attraction was sensory, collective. Vijay’s rallies run on the same old logic. People don’t just come to listen. They come to be near him, or at least his campaign vehicle, to wave at a tinted window, photograph the vehicle if not him, and stand inside the perimeter. Not ideology but proximity. The rally, like Victoria Hall, is less message than event. Distance builds longing.
In his account of the Karur stampede, author Perumal Murugan described details that are hard to forget. Some who collapsed were revived under medical tents. But when they regained consciousness, their first question was: “Has Vijay left?” When told he had already come, a few pulled out their glucose drips and tried to run back. That is not the reflex of a voter. That is the reflex of someone chasing a sighting. Politics usually produces arguments. This produces pursuit.
Who are these fans?
Prominent Chennai-based psychiatrist and author Dr Sivabalan Elangovan frames it in generational terms. For many teenagers and people in their twenties, the rally is not a political act at all, he says. It is social currency.
“In a life where everything happens inside the phone, being physically present somewhere big becomes proof that you exist. A selfie with the campaign bus, a video, a post. That’s the reward. It’s the fear of missing out. They don’t want to be the only ones who didn’t go,” he says.
Participation becomes content and attendance becomes identity. The rally is less about governance or politics and more about belonging. Many women in their thirties and early forties, especially from lower-middle-class or rural backgrounds, treat these events almost like rare excursions away from their daily lives: part outing, part escape, and part fantasy.
It wasn’t always ideological. For many young women in Karur whom The Indian Express spoke to the day after the stampede, it was simply a rare escape, “the one day I get to step out and see someone I’ve admired for years”.
Here, the star offers not policy, but relief.
Is all this a hype?
There is also the risk of misreading all this. What if there is a collective effort to turn Vijay’s supporters into caricatures? The easy story is that they are somehow irrational.
Tamil Nadu has seen stars enter politics before. M G Ramachandran, popularly known as MGR, did, Jayalalithaa did. But they came attached to movements, magazines, theatre circuits, party cadres — a long political apprenticeship. MGR rose not just as a star but backed by the ideological machinery of the Dravidian movement. Jayalalithaa inherited that structure.
Vijay seems to be attempting something riskier: importing cinema’s emotional mechanics directly into politics. Not organisation, but aura. Not cadre, but crowd. Not ideology, but intimacy. Just charisma. And an algorithm. And all this leaves established parties, even the formidable DMK, feeling oddly flat-footed because you can counter an argument but can’t easily counter longing.