The Indian actor C. Joseph Vijay was sworn in on Sunday as chief minister of Tamil Nadu after his Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) party won an outright majority in state elections, ending more than half a century of alternation between the DMK and the AIADMK in India’s sixth most populous state. Vijay, who at fifty has been the dominant box-office figure in Tamil cinema for two decades and announced his political party only in early 2024, ran on an anti-corruption platform that pitched both established Dravidian parties as exhausted dynastic operations and promised “a Tamil Nadu that does not need to be ashamed of its government.” The result is being read by Indian commentators as the latest evidence that the country’s regional politics have become more, not less, distinct from the national contest dominated by the BJP and its weakened Congress opposition.
The received wisdom
The standard liberal-Indian framing of Vijay’s victory is that it represents a worrying further fusion of celebrity and state in the world’s largest democracy: a charismatic actor with no governing experience, riding a fan-club apparatus repurposed as a political machine, has now taken the executive office of a state with a $300 billion economy and the country’s most successful industrial-policy track record. On this account, the result is part of a global pattern — Trump in the United States, Zelensky in Ukraine, the One Nation breakthrough in rural Australia, Reform’s surge in Britain — in which voters are turning to entertainers and outsiders because the established political class has lost their confidence. The further version of this reading, briefed by DMK figures over the weekend, is that Vijay will discover, as the AAP discovered in Delhi and Punjab, that running a fan club is not the same as running a state, and that the policy machinery of Tamil Nadu — its Public Distribution System, its industrial corridors, its complex centre-state revenue arrangements — does not accommodate amateur improvisation.
A different read
The Indian liberal alarm at “celebrity politics” misreads its own state’s history in a way that is worth correcting before drawing wider conclusions. Tamil Nadu is the original celebrity-political state, and has been since the 1960s. M. G. Ramachandran, a film star who became chief minister in 1977, founded a political tradition that produced Karunanidhi (a screenwriter), Jayalalithaa (an actress), and a continuous succession of Dravidian politicians whose route to office ran through the Tamil-language film industry. The Tamil electorate has been making cinema-to-government transitions for sixty years and has, on the whole, been governed competently for it: Tamil Nadu’s social indicators on health, female literacy, and infant mortality are among the best in India and the result of policy continuity, not personality cult. The premise that an actor cannot govern is empirically shaky in the specific state where the experiment has been run repeatedly.
The conservative point worth making here — and it cuts against the standard Western reading of Indian politics — is that the rise of regional, identity-anchored, leader-driven parties is not a symptom of democratic decline but of democratic depth. India’s federal architecture, designed by Ambedkar and Patel precisely to allow linguistic and regional self-government within a national frame, is doing what it was meant to do. The TVK victory is consistent with the same impulse that produced the Trinamool’s continued strength in West Bengal, the YSRCP’s collapse and the TDP’s recovery in Andhra, and the BJP’s persistent struggle to break through south of the Vindhyas. A national press, particularly the English-language press in Delhi, that treats every regional outcome as evidence of a national pathology is making a category error. India’s regions are not failing to converge on a national norm; they are exercising the federal autonomy the constitution gave them. Ross Douthat’s general observation about American federalism — that the most successful national orders are the ones that resist the temptation to centralise their cultural disagreements — applies in India with at least as much force.
The harder question Vijay’s victory raises is about the BJP’s southern strategy, which has now failed in Tamil Nadu for the third electoral cycle in a row and has been hollowed out further by the TVK absorbing the anti-DMK protest vote that the BJP had been hoping to inherit. The Modi government’s response over the weekend was characteristically restrained — a congratulatory statement and an offer of central cooperation — but the strategic problem is real: the BJP cannot construct a stable national majority on the present geographic basis indefinitely, and Tamil Nadu is the largest of the southern states it has not been able to crack. Niall Ferguson’s framework on imperial overstretch travels usefully into Indian federal politics: a national party that cannot govern its territorial periphery has to rely on coalition arithmetic that constrains it on the issues that brought it to power.
There is, finally, a distinctively conservative observation about the Vijay phenomenon that the alarmist framing entirely misses. His campaign was, in policy terms, more economically liberal and culturally moderate than the DMK he displaced: he has spoken approvingly of small-business protection, of restraining the inflation that has hammered Tamil Nadu’s lower-middle classes, of cleaning up the corruption around state contracts that even sympathetic observers acknowledged was endemic under the previous DMK administration. The vote was, by Indian standards, a centre-right protest vote against a left-of-centre Dravidian establishment that had become indistinguishable from a cartel. That a film star was the vehicle is a feature of Tamil political culture; the underlying impulse is recognisable to anyone who has watched the British, Australian, and American results of the past month.
What to watch
First, the cabinet Vijay names — whether it is dominated by film-industry loyalists or includes credible Tamil technocrats will tell us which kind of government this is going to be. Second, the centre-state relationship: the BJP’s instinct will be to wait for him to fail; whether it can resist trying to engineer that failure will say something about Indian federalism. Third, the TVK’s organisational reach beyond Tamil Nadu — Vijay has spoken of a southern federation; whether other southern states see TVK candidates emerge in the next cycle would be a structural shift. Fourth, the AIADMK and DMK responses: whether they triangulate or radicalise will determine whether Tamil Nadu has acquired a new dominant party or is simply between alignments.
— J