Joseph Vijay's historic victory in Tamil Nadu is the most significant political development in the state in a generation. But Eelam Tamils should be cautious.
It has been a remarkable week across the Palk Strait. Joseph Vijay, the actor who walked away from one of Tamil cinema's most decorated careers to enter politics, has pulled off a stunning electoral triumph against Tamil Nadu's established parties. His Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) emerged as the single largest force in the 234-member assembly on its first outing at the ballot box, winning 108 seats at an election that recorded the highest voter turnout in the state's history. The DMK, which had governed Tamil Nadu since 2021, was routed. M.K. Stalin lost his own seat. A political landscape dominated by the same two parties for half a century has been overturned.
Eelam Tamil representatives greeted the result with hope. ITAK MP Sivagnanam Shritharan described the outcome as a "historic victory" and said that Eelam Tamils see it as their own. Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam's Tamil National Council wrote formally to Vijay urging him to raise the question of a political solution with New Delhi and at international forums, invoking the "umbilical cord relationship" between Eelam Tamils and Tamil Nadu. The sentiments are genuine. The millennia-long connection across the Palk Strait requires no explanation.
But it is worth being precise about what this election result means.
Vijay's victory was, at its core, an anti-incumbency verdict. Tamil Nadu's voters went to the polls to reject both the DMK and AIADMK for decades of perceived corruption and dynastic entrenchment. Vijay offered something the established parties could not. He had the credibility of an outsider, a charismatic appeal built through years of leading Kollywood roles and the energy of a new political movement spearheaded by a legion of loyal cinema fans. It is a pattern visible across the democratic world with voters reaching for new movements not because they are ideologically precise, but because the old things have failed them.
Vijay was not the most outspoken candidate on Tamil Eelam in this election, and his engagement with the cause has been criticised as selective. But he has not shied away from it. Amongst his previous appearances at protests, in November 2008, in the midst of the Sri Lankan military's final offensive, he organised a hunger strike in Chennai and told the crowd "let freedom dawn for Eelam Tamils." During this campaign he described Prabhakaran as having shown Tamil people "motherly love" and called Eelam solidarity a duty. His party's foundational resolutions called for a referendum on Tamil Eelam independence and demanded Tamil Nadu be consulted on India's foreign policy toward Sri Lanka. These represent a more direct articulation of the cause than anything the DMK managed in five years of government.
But the DMK also spoke this language, in its time. So did the AIADMK. Tamil Nadu has never lacked chief ministers willing to call for justice for Eelam Tamils at press conferences, pass resolutions in the assembly, stage symbolic (sometimes farcical) protests, or write letters to the Prime Minister. What it has consistently lacked is a government willing to pay a political price with New Delhi to advance those demands.
That price need not be prohibitive. As the second largest economy in India, Tamil Nadu is not a minor player. With around six per cent of the country's population, the state contributes nearly a tenth of India's national GDP - a figure that reached $369 billion in 2024, equivalent to the entire economy of Pakistan. It recorded the highest real growth rate of any Indian state last year, leads the country in manufacturing, and is targeting a one trillion dollar economy by 2030. When a Tamil Nadu chief minister speaks to New Delhi, they speak with the weight of an economy the Indian government cannot afford to ignore. The question has never been whether the leverage exists. It has always been whether any chief minister has been willing to use it.
There is already one early signal that deserves attention. The TVK fell ten seats short of an outright majority. To form a government, Vijay reached out to the Indian National Congress, a party inseparable from some of the darkest chapters in modern Tamil history, from the IPKF intervention to New Delhi's support for Sri Lanka during the final stages of the genocide. What constraints that alliance places on what Vijay can say or do on Tamil Eelam, and what price Congress extracted for its support, has not been answered. It needs to be.
We do not write this to diminish what has happened. Vijay's willingness to speak about Eelam publicly during a competitive election campaign is meaningful. And it is true that a political order in a powerful state has been broken. The wave of anti-establishment sentiment that carried TVK to power reflects a genuine exhaustion, with institutions and parties that promised much and delivered little. It is one that Eelam Tamils understand well.
But we also know better than to invest our aspirations in other people's electoral victories. The question is not what Vijay said during the campaign. It is what his government does in office. It is whether it uses Chennai's leverage to press New Delhi on accountability, on the occupation, on political prisoners, and on Tamil self-determination. Words across the Palk Strait have never been the shortage.