‘Fun’ superstar stuns rivals, reshapes politics in Indian state
Film star turned politician C Joseph Vijay is at the cusp of history in the state of Tamil Nadu.
On Monday, his political party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) defied all opponents and almost won the national elections, marking a break in the established political order.
Vijay’s spectacular rise is being compared to that of matinee idol MG Ramachandran, who broke away from the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) to form his own party and become chief minister in 1977.
But even though Vijay’s victory delighted fans and supporters, he has hurdles to overcome to reach the top position. To form a government in the 234-member Tamil Nadu assembly, a party needs 118 seats. Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) won 108, leaving it 10 seats short of securing a majority.
That means that over the coming days, Vijay will have to shift from crowd-puller to coalition-builder, negotiating with smaller parties and independent lawmakers to cross the threshold and claim power.
Even then, his performance marks a landmark political moment in a state that for decades has chosen between two established regional parties: the DMK and its rival the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK).
For some, the explanation lies as much in personality as in politics.
“Vijay conveys a different kind of verve,” says social scientist Shiv Visvanathan. “It offers a sense of fun, confidence and an aura of competence that is rooted in individuality and gives it a different kind of power.”
In the weeks following the vote, Vijay carefully crafted his public image – not on screen, but by visiting important temples and churches.
Images of these visits flooded television screens and cell phones. In a state where modern politics has been shaped by rationalist thought and the self-respect movement – which envisioned a society in which marginalized castes would have equal rights – the visible shift towards faith seems deliberate.
Tamil Nadu has long been sensitive to political theater, where cinema and power often merge into a single continuum. From Ramachandran to his successor J Jayalalithaa, film stars entered politics and went on to rule the state.
Vijay enters this lineage, but at a different political moment.
Analysts say he enters a landscape still dominated by the DMK and AIADMK – a duopoly that appears broadly stable on paper, but is showing signs of fatigue on the ground. This, they argue, opens space for new political experiments – and allows figures like Vijay to test the extent to which star power can translate into lasting political authority.
“Vijay’s timing as a politician is ideal,” says Visvanathan. “He comes at a time when established leaders are seen as jaded. He represents youth – and a new interplay of memory and messaging in how voters imagine their leaders.”
Vijay’s path to political triumph was not so easy.
His film Jana Nayagan (People’s Leader), which was should be released in Januarywas supposed to be Vijay’s last on-screen outing after he announced that he was heading into politics full-time. But the film ran into trouble with the Indian Film Classification Board, with the makers even approaching the court to get its release. It is still unclear when Jananayagan will hit the theaters.
Vijay only officially launched his TVK party in 2024. Yet his political decisions date back much longer.
As early as 2009, he began reorganizing fan clubs into Vijay Makkal Iyakkam – a social network that worked at the neighborhood level, offering relief, educational support and local assistance.
In 2011, he was already testing his political reach by supporting an AIADMK alliance, testing whether fandom could translate into votes.
Over the next decade, Vijay’s film events took on an increasingly political tone as he spoke to younger audiences about exam stress, unemployment and corruption, and later criticized the controversial An Act to amend the Citizenship Act in 2019.
When he finally gave up acting after nearly 70 films to pursue politics full-time, the message was clear: this was not an extension of celebrity, but its deliberate conversion into political capital.
Voters in Tamil Nadu have long understood the language of charisma. What sets Vijay apart is the scale and breadth of the base he is trying to build.
The shift in Vijay’s favor is more pronounced among younger voters and women, according to pollster Pradeep Gupta of Axis My India.
Voters aged 18 to 39 – about 42% of the Tamil Nadu electorate – are showing particularly strong support, particularly those voting for the first time.
Women also appear to have rallied to his party in significant numbers, with support cutting across caste lines, including among the Scheduled Castes (SC) and Other Backward Classes (OBC) in the state.
Political strategist Prashant Kishor puts it more simply: “He is the new hope of Tamil Nadu.”
For now, that appeal is defined less by detailed policy than by the promise of change.
TM Krishna, eminent Indian singer, author and social activist, says: “Elections are about igniting the imagination. This is not a verdict against Dravidian politics. It’s something else. Vijay offers a new imagination“.
In Tamil Nadu, Dravidian politics – led by the DMK and AIADMK – rooted in social justice and welfare, dominated for decades. It also paid off: the state recorded 11.2% growth in 2024-25, with strong gains in manufacturing and some of India’s strongest social indicators.
Yet performance has not dampened the appetite for change. Analysts say stability can breed its own anxiety, particularly among younger voters, who are less invested in legacy narratives and more attracted to renewal.
This helps explain the contrast with other superstars like Rajinikanth who also had an interest in politics but stopped short. Even Kamal Hassan, who launched a political party, failed to create an impact on the ground.
Vijay has made the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) his ideological adversary and the incumbent DMK his immediate political rival – a positioning that reflects Tamil Nadu’s long resistance to BJP expansion, rooted in language politics and a strong regional identity, as well as a promise of freshness.
But not everyone is convinced. Author and analyst Nilakantan RS points out the weakness of TVK’s policy.
“There is an absence of any original position on the real issues,” he says. “Virality has become the currency of his actions.”
He sees Vijay’s temple visits and public gestures as calibrated actions aimed at specific audiences – raising the risk of a policy driven more by image than administrative depth.
And yet, attraction is rooted in familiarity.
Tamil Nadu doesn’t just admire its movie stars: it invests in them, often seeing it as a more immediate and personal form of justice.
It remains one of the most stable and successful states in India. Yet behind this stability, a younger electorate is increasingly agitated.
“This election must herald change,” Vijay said during his campaign.
His supporters echo this sentiment in a more blunt way. “People are tired of the two big parties. They want change. They see TVK as that change,” said party spokesman Felix Gerald.