Uphill task for political startups despite Joseph Vijay’s win in TN

Tamil actor Chandrasekaran Joseph Vijay’s surprise victory in the 2026 Tamil Nadu Assembly elections in a tad over two years since founding his political outfit, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK), obviously raised hopes among those who are looking to chart out on their own and carve a niche for themselves in India’s political firmament. With India doing well in the startup space, will political startups have similar levels of success? Will we see more political unicorns, a la TVK?

Several factors helped Vijay. For a few decades, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) dominated Tamil Nadu politics. But post the demise of Jayaram Jayalalithaa in 2016, AIADMK could find neither a strong nor a charismatic leader to fill the vacuum. Though AIADMK was in power till 2021 after she died in harness as the Chief Minister, the party lost the subsequent Assembly elections and DMK rode to power.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also tried to cash in on the political vacuum by appointing an aggressive, but articulate, person like K Annamalai, a former IPS officer, as the party’s state president. But the saffron party took a hasty decision to replace Annamalai with a low-profile leader as its Tamil Nadu unit chief just a few months before the 2026 Assembly elections. BJP did that to clinch an alliance deal with AIADMK with a hope that the latter would help the saffron party taste power in the key southern state. But such hopes went for a toss.

If people want to defeat a political party, they decide it much before the election fever kicks in. However, they will take their own sweet time before deciding on which is the best alternative. That happened in West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the recent elections. The dissatisfaction with the rulers was so intense in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu that even sitting chief ministers in the two states lost in their respective Assembly constituencies. But when people in these two states looked for an alternative, West Bengal had the BJP waiting in the wings. It was not so in Tamil Nadu as AIADMK-led NDA was not considered by the electorate as the best alternative. So, they went for TVK. Frankly speaking, BJP would have done far better in Tamil Nadu had it retained Annamalai as its state chief and gone solo. The saffron party is frequently getting its political playbook wrong in the south of Vindhyas. But let’s save the topic for some other day.

In the past, many people founded political parties but failed at hustings. In 2005, popular Tamil film actor Vijayakanth floated MDMK. His political career did not take off despite his popularity. In 2008, Telugu Megastar Chiranjeevi launched Praja Rajyam Party (PRP). Despite his filmy glamour, PRP remained in third place in the 2009 Andhra Pradesh Assembly polls. Another Tamil actor Kamal Hasan also unsuccessfully dabbled with politics in Tamil Nadu. Several others met with a similar fate in the country. New political parties fail either when there is no political vacuum or when people don’t take such parties seriously.

Chiranjeevi’s younger brother Pawan Kalyan, who is also a popular actor, founded Jana Sena Party (JSP) in 2014. But JSP managed to win just one seat in the 2019 Assembly elections in Andhra Pradesh and Pawan Kalyan lost both the seats he contested in. That humiliating defeat made him more pragmatic. Though Pawan’s well-wishers and followers want to see him as the Chief Minister someday, that is unlikely to happen in the near future. Pawan knows this very well and it was amply reflected in his recent comments post Vijay’s victory in Tamil Nadu and suggestions that like Vijay, Pawan should have gone solo in Andhra Pradesh. Pawan Kalyan himself found fault with such comparisons.

Comparing Vijay and Pawan is meaningless because political situations in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are starkly different. But Pawan made a strategic blunder by supporting the Telugu Desam Party (TDP)-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in 2014 without his party being in fray. In that election, he extended unconditional support to TDP and BJP.

An actor with mass appeal can cash in on his popularity in the political arena only once. After that, he must be on his own. Going by this dictum, Pawan tapped his stardom in the 2014 elections itself. That’s the reason why he lost the 2019 elections miserably as there was no deposit left in his stardom account. Losing both seats that he contested must have disappointed him to the core. However, he bounced back politically in 2024 thanks to his strategic move to offer support to TDP president Nara Chandrababu Naidu when the latter was arrested by the then YS Jagan government. Pawan met Naidu in Rajamahendravaram jail, came out and announced his willingness to have alliance with the TDP. Going by the ground realities and intense anti-incumbency wave against Jagan, TDP could come back to power on its own in 2024. But it would have secured a simple majority. On its own, the TDP’s tally stood at 135, while that of the TDP-led alliance was at 164. So, the alliance with TDP in 2024 saved Pawan and his Janasena party from the brink. It is very unlikely that Janasena will win many seats if it contests on its own in future general elections too. Even the Kapu vote base will not help him. Pawan, currently Deputy CM of AP, should also try to avoid the kind of controversies he raked up in Telangana recently.

However, some new political parties have tasted success in the last two decades. Arvind Kejriwal, a bureaucrat-turned-politician, founded Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) in 2012 after the Anna Hazare-led anti-corruption movement shook the nation. Kejriwal, who actively participated in that movement, went on to become the Chief Minister of Delhi after AAP emerged as the single largest party in the Assembly polls in the national capital in 2013. He remained in that position till 2025 with a small gap in between.

Another successful new political party is Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) founded in 2001 by K Chandrashekar Rao. But success came late for the party as it came to power in Telangana after the creation of the new state in 2014. Of course, TRS, which subsequently changed its name to Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS), bungled in the 2023 Assembly polls.

YS Jagan Mohan Reddy established YSR Congress Party in 2011 after the demise of his father YS Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR), a popular Chief Minister from the Congress party in undivided Andhra Pradesh. YSRCP won the 2019 polls in AP. While the anti-corruption movement created political space for AAP, it was the separate Telangana movement that helped BRS. YSR’s popularity propelled YSRCP into the power corridors.

However, there will be no scope for new political parties in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh for a decade or so. While TDP and YSRCP are strong in Andhra Pradesh, the ruling Congress and BRS are occupying major political space with BJP waiting in the wings in Telangana. In Tamil Nadu, there is still some space for a political alternative unless Vijay consolidates his position.

But Vijay’s victory has fuelled a new social media phenomenon called Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). But it is not easy for a new political outfit to take on BJP at the national level as the saffron party is well-entrenched now. However, there will be scope for new alternatives if the Congress-led alliance continues to fail as the Opposition at the national level and people start looking for a strong alternative to BJP. That way, developments like CJP will do more harm to Congress than for BJP. But it’s not easy for such social media-fueled political movements to survive at the national level in a vast country like India. The CJP phenomenon is likely to fizzle out soon.

All said and done, despite Vijay’s surprise victory in Tamil Nadu in this year’s elections, it’s not going to be easy for new political parties to succeed in India unless there is a clearcut political vacuum and a new party enters at the right time to tap that vacuum. If there is no political space, any new party will succeed only if the founder struggles, sustains the momentum for 10-15 years with the right strategies and adequate funding mechanism, and carves out a political space.

Not many politicians have that kind of patience, funds and right strategies. That was the reason why many new political parties failed. This will happen in the future too. So, we may not see political unicorns in near future, more so in the two Telugu states.