Vijay's next frontier: TVK quietly begins Kerala expansion

There is a moment that captures something important about Vijay's relationship with Kerala.

Back in March 2024, the Tamil superstar and current CM of Tamil Nadu reached Kerala for the first time in 14 years. He was there for the shoot of the film Greatest of All Time. That day, Kochi Airport couldn't take the frenzy of Vijay fans. Visuals from the airport and the road went viral as thousands of fans gathered around his car for a glimpse of Vijay. It was reported that the car he travelled in was dented due to the crowd that surrounded it. Such is the frenzy the fans have for the star.

Much water has gushed down the Peiryar river since. Tamil Nadu elections happened, Vijay has become Chief Minister and his party Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) has become a political force to reckon with. The natural question now is: Will TVK now expand to Kerala, where Vijay has a massive fan base? TVK in Kerala has quietly moved dices in Kerala though nothing official has been announced yet.

''Discussions are happening across the state. In Palakkad and Wayanad, there have been informal discussions. Clarity will emerge sooner or later. In two months, things are expected to take final shape,'' said a source close to TVK Kerala unit.

Long before his official entry into politics, Vijay’s fan club — the Vijay Makkal Iyakkam (VMI) — was arguably just as active in Kerala as it was in Tamil Nadu. The state boasts thousands of registered fan units that routinely engage in extensive social welfare, disaster relief, and charity programmes.

TVK’s core ideology centres around secularism, social justice, and egalitarianism, explicitly rejecting right-wing politics. This centre-Left alignment heavily mirrors the progressive social fabric of Kerala.

Given Vijay’s monumental stardom and massive, highly organized fan base in Kerala, the ground is ripe for TVK's official launch in the state

Kerala has long treated Vijay as its own. His films open there with the same fevered anticipation as any Malayalam superstar's. Almost all of his films open to packed houses on opening day, and in return, the actor has made sure to pay homage to his Malayalam fans in his films. He teamed up with Mohanlal for his film Jilla (2014), giving his fans a double treat. In Theri, he played a character named Joseph Kuruvilla from Kerala, and such hat-tips have been a long-standing tradition.

A government built on an alliance

To understand TVK's Kerala ambitions, you have to start with how the party actually came to power in Tamil Nadu. TVK won 108 seats in the April 2026 Assembly elections, an extraordinary debut, but fell ten short of the 118-seat majority mark. It was Congress's five MLAs who provided the first crucial boost. Rahul Gandhi flew from Delhi to Chennai to attend the swearing-in ceremony on May 10, a symbolic gesture. The two leaders appearing together generated millions of views. The alliance was new, forged under pressure, but it held.

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What made it more significant was what was happening simultaneously in the politics of Kerala: the Congress-led United Democratic Front swept Kerala's April 2026 elections with 102 of 140 seats — its best performance since 1977, ending a decade of Left Democratic Front rule. Congress alone won 63 seats, making it the single largest party in the state. Two election victories, one shared ally, states that share a border. The corridor for TVK to walk into Kerala, if it chooses, is not difficult to imagine.

The first flag in Wayanad

Steps have been initiated to establish TVK's first political unit in Vengappally, a border town in Wayanad district. The effort is led by Safwan Khalil and a group of roughly 20 young people — IT professionals and commerce graduates — who have put up flex boards across town and are registering members through the My TVK app.

But the formal structure has not yet caught up with the enthusiasm. As reported by The News Minute, fan associations across Kerala, organised, active, and long-established, are waiting for an official signal from Tamil Nadu's party leadership before making any move under the TVK banner. Soumya SS, Thiruvananthapuram district president of the organisation's women's wing, put it plainly: "We need official permission when we do so under the name of a political party. Many Vijay fans in Kerala are waiting for that announcement."

In the meantime, the internet has moved faster than the party. Reports claim that a cluster of unofficial TVK pages and WhatsApp groups, purporting to be district committees in Calicut, Malappuram, Alappuzha, Ernakulam and elsewhere, have been active since as far back as September 2025, none of them followed by the party's official handle.

What kind of politics could travel

TVK has built its identity around "secular social justice", a platform designed to be portable, untethered to caste arithmetic or linguistic pride in the way older Dravidian parties are. In Tamil Nadu, it drew roughly 35 per cent of the popular vote in its very first election, building on Vijay's 85,000-strong fan club network to construct a grassroots cadre structure in under two years.

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Kerala is a different proposition. The Left, despite its historic 2026 defeat, retains a committed ideological base. The IUML wields real influence in the Muslim-majority belt, and is also a TVK coalition partner in Tamil Nadu. Congress, fresh from a landslide, has no obvious reason to encourage a new entrant that could eventually compete for the same young, aspirational voters TVK targets.

The question Congress will eventually have to answer is whether TVK in Kerala is an asset, a friendly force that deepens the anti-BJP bloc, or a long-term complication it would rather not have.

The prospect, not the certainty

None of this is inevitable. A flex board in Vengappally and a WhatsApp group in Ernakulam do not make a political party. TVK has governing responsibilities in Tamil Nadu to consolidate first. However, what is clear is that the raw material is there, the fanbase, the alliance, the border geography, the app, and that the party knows it. Whether TVK's Kerala chapter becomes a serious political project or remains a fan movement wearing a party badge will depend on decisions that have not yet been made in Chennai.

Interestingly, Vijay was invited for the swearing-in event of VD Satheesan, but he did not attend. It is not clear why he stayed away from the event.