Actor‑politician Vijay’s Salem show on Friday, 13 February 2026, was carefully staged to project him as a mass saviour in the MG Ramachandran mould – right down to a symbolic whip pressed into his hands.
At the Tamilaga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) event in Salem, district functionaries presented Vijay with a Vel (victory spear) and a whip, followed later by a “Vetri Sengol” (victory sceptre) and a second sceptre from the Salem unit. The whip, announced as one that would “hate evil forces,” “channel the power of the sun,” and serve as a “victory whip” to protect the people of Tamil Nadu and their “Tamil leader,” was clearly designed as a throwback to MGR’s iconic whip‑wielding image against corruption and injustice.
Remember the “Naan aanai ittal song”?
This is also alleged to be a part of the imagery in Jana Nayagan movie.
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The stagecraft did not stop there. The twin‑sceptre moment was framed to send Vijay off as a righteous ruler‑in‑waiting, “arriving with twin sengols” in Mango City, while the emcee underlined that this whip was “not for homes, not for personal use, not even for the nation alone,” but specifically to guard Tamil Nadu and its leader.
What jars is the gap between imagery and practice. Vijay, who has largely kept himself barricaded in his Panaiyur residence, carefully avoiding open press conferences or unscripted Q&As, is now leaning heavily on props and nostalgia to force the MGR comparison without yet exposing himself to MGR‑style public scrutiny. Friday’s event itself was not an open janasabha but a tightly controlled meeting restricted to about 5,000 vetted TVK functionaries holding QR‑coded passes, with ordinary Salem residents and most of the press kept at arm’s length.
For a leader who claims to be breaking from the old Dravidian script, the whip‑and‑sengol choreography suggests something else: Vijay is borrowing the visual grammar and moral halo of MGR’s era while still playing a guarded, star‑centric politics where optics substitute for genuine engagement.
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