Thalapathy Vijay has arrived. No, we are not talking about a film but politics, possibly the next CM. Tamil Nadu seems to have chosen yet another star as their leader, if these trends translate into final results later today. Tamil Nadu has always believed that the screen and the street are not that different and the reel hero could well be a real-life hero. Both require a man who can make a crowd believe. Both reward those who play the hero convincingly enough that voters stop asking whether it's real.
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The state has produced two of India's most consequential actor-politicians. The third may be arriving now.
The state has produced three movements built on screen charisma — and the third is unfolding on counting day right now. TVK has raced ahead in Tamil nadu, leaving behind the ruling DMK that slipped into the third spot.
The Superstars of Tamil Nadu Politics.
MG Ramachandran didn't just enter politics. He rewired it.
"When we show his face, we get 40,000 votes; when he speaks a few words, we get 4 lakhs,” said CN Annadurai, the DMK founder and Tamil Nadu's first Chief Minister from a Dravidian party about MGR while he was still a party colleague.
MG Ramachandran built a party in five years that the rest of Tamil Nadu's political establishment spent decades trying to match. Expelled from the DMK by Karunanidhi in October 1972, he founded the AIADMK with nine defecting MLAs and two MPs. By 1977, the party had 130 of 234 assembly seats. The AIADMK, according to Election Commission records, also won outright majorities of 129 and 132 seats in 1980 and 1984, each time returning MGR as chief minister. He governed until his death in December 1987, a decade of unbroken power, built on something no ideological party had used so deliberately before: an existing mass emotional relationship between a man and his audience.
The MGR manrams — fan clubs cultivated inside the DMK before his expulsion — became his ground army overnight. Every character he played on screen was a poor man defying a corrupt elite. In office, he introduced the Nutritious Noon Meal Scheme, which according to peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of Education and Integrated Research, had its largest impact on Scheduled Caste children from below-poverty-line families. The screen persona and the governing instinct were the same thing.
When MGR died, the AIADMK briefly fractured. His wife Janaki held the chief ministership for 24 days. Jayalalithaa, a trained Bharatanatyam dancer and MGR's leading lady across multiple films, then consolidated the party and remade it in her own image.
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