On Tuesday, the morning after Tamil Nadu’s election results had turned the state’s political order on its head, with Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam emerging victorious, filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma posted an old, unseen photograph of the young actor on X.
The photograph showed M. Karunanidhi at what appears to be a film function. He is at the front of the frame, as he usually was. Standing somewhere behind him, barely noticeable, is a young Vijay. RGV’s caption read: “Kalaignar wouldn’t have dreamed that the kid behind him would one day destroy his party.”
Kalaingar wouldn’t have dreamed that the kid behind him would one day destroy his party 🙏👍🔥 pic.twitter.com/7NNp6Ge73S
— Ram Gopal Varma (@RGVzoomin) May 5, 2026
The tweet spread quickly, and the reason was not hard to understand. Vijay’s Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam had won 108 seats in its very first election on Monday, making it the single largest party in Tamil Nadu. The DMK, the party Karunanidhi ran for nearly five decades, finished with 59. His son and outgoing Chief Minister M.K. Stalin lost his own seat. The duopoly that had governed Tamil Nadu politics since the late 1980s was over, and a first-time party led by a film star had ended it.
What the DMK represented
Understanding why RGV’s photograph carried the weight it did requires some sense of what that organisation represented in Tamil Nadu’s public life.Karunanidhi took charge of the DMK in 1969 and held that position until he died in August 2018. Before politics, he had written screenplays for Tamil films, which gave him a deep familiarity with the industry and the cultural influence that came with it. As a politician, he served as Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu five times across different decades. The DMK under him became inseparable from the broader Dravidian political movement, a force that had shaped Tamil identity and governance since the 1960s.
When Karunanidhi died, his son, M K Stalin, took over the party and eventually led it to a strong victory in the 2021 assembly elections. He became Chief Minister that year and spent the following five years governing the state. Heading into 2026, the DMK was the incumbent. It had resources, experience, established voter relationships, and the weight of its own history behind it.
Built fast, won faster
Vijay announced the formation of TVK on February 2, 2024. He had spent the better part of three decades as one of Tamil cinema’s most bankable names, and when he stepped away from that to enter politics, the move was treated with a mix of curiosity and scepticism in equal measure. Actor-turned-politician is not a new story in Tamil Nadu. What was new was the scale and the method.
Rather than attaching TVK to an existing alliance for protection, Vijay chose to put his party up against all 234 constituencies alone. No seat-sharing, no borrowed political infrastructure, no safety net from established partners. Every seat TVK won would come entirely from its own effort.
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The Photograph
Vijay’s father, S.A. Chandrasekhar, spent his career in Tamil cinema as a director and producer. That background almost certainly explains why a young Vijay was present at an industry function where Karunanidhi was the chief guest. Tamil cinema and Tamil politics were never cleanly separated spheres, and Karunanidhi moved comfortably between both throughout his life. A film function with Karunanidhi in attendance would have been a routine occasion. A filmmaker’s son standing somewhere in the crowd would have been equally unremarkable. No one was thinking about what either person in that frame would mean to the other, or to Tamil Nadu, decades later.
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