4 min readHyderabadMay 4, 2026 06:07 PM IST
In November 2018, Vijay walked into Tamil Nadu’s political imagination through a film called Sarkar. The character Vijay played, Sundar Ramaswamy, was a successful NRI businessman who flies back home for one reason: to vote. He arrives at the polling booth and is told his vote has already been cast in his name. What follows is a two-hour takedown of electoral fraud, political corruption, and a system that treats voters as props. By the end of the film, Sundar Ramaswamy is not just fighting for his vote. He is contesting an election, standing against career politicians, and winning.
It was a fantasy, a crowd-pleasing, interval-block, mass hero fantasy. Eight years later, Vijay took the political plunge, turning his goodwill as an actor into political currency. In February 2024, he announced he was leaving films behind and launching Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK). No senior party backing him, no political family name, no alliance with DMK or AIADMK which have wielded power in the state for decades.
What TVK did in the two years between its launch and election day was less glamorous than any of this. Booth-level organising across 234 constituencies. A party conference in October 2024 that drew an extraordinary number of people to Vikravandi. A manifesto built around the people most likely to feel the gap between what governments promise and what they deliver: women, students, first-time voters, daily wage workers.
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On May 4, 2026, when the counting started, TVK led in over a hundred seats. The DMK, which had come to power in 2021 with a comfortable majority, was trailing. The AIADMK, the same party that had tried to bury Sarkar eight years earlier, was fighting for its political survival.
The Election Commission of India, in a footnote that now reads like a prophecy, had used Vijay’s Sarkar’s central plot point after the film released in 2019 to spread awareness about a voter’s legal right to reclaim their ballot if someone votes fraudulently in their name.
In the film, Vijay’s Sundar Ramaswamy had stood before Tamil Nadu in 2018 and made one appeal above all others: go and vote. Use what belongs to you. Do not let it be taken from you or wasted by your own absence. Tamil Nadu had watched it, clapped for it, and gone home.
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Eight years later, Tamil Nadu went to the polls and recorded a voter turnout of 85.1 percent, the highest ever recorded in a state assembly election. Across 32 of the state’s 38 districts, more than 80 percent of registered voters turned out. In some constituencies the numbers climbed above 90 percent. People queued before the booths opened. Young voters showed up in numbers that caught everyone’s attention. The western districts, which rarely make headlines for voter enthusiasm, recorded a turnout that surprised observers.
The man who once urged a fictional electorate to use its vote was on the ballot this time. Whether Vijay’s two-year campaign directly drove those turnout numbers is not something anyone can say with certainty. What is harder to dismiss is that the highest ever assembly election turnout in Tamil Nadu’s history happened in the same election in which he was a candidate.
On May 4, as counting got underway, TVK led in over a hundred constituencies. The DMK, which had won 159 seats in 2021 and entered this election as the incumbent, was trailing well behind. The AIADMK, once the dominant force in Tamil Nadu politics, was struggling to stay relevant in its own state.
Eight years later, the man who played that character appears to have written the same ending for himself. Except this one has no credits, no interval, and no guaranteed second half. Governing Tamil Nadu is a different matter from winning it, and the state that handed Vijay this result will be watching closely to see what he does with it.
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