On 12 March 2026, TVK Vijay’s right-hand man and the party’s General Secretary for Election Campaign Management Aadhav Arjuna aimed at Rajinikanth claiming the DMK family threatened actor Rajinikanth when he attempted to enter politics in Tamil Nadu.
Arjuna was desperately trying to prop up his leader — a man who fled after a stampede killed 41 people, including children. He stayed holed up in his house for three days, then emerged with a filmi-style video as if he were threatening CM Stalin. Not an apology. Not a visit to the victims’ homes. Instead, the grieving families were made to come to him.
Joseph Vijay has a problem. His party has no ideology, no governance record, no original thought, and nothing independently produced to show Tamil Nadu. So, what Aadhav Arjuna did was exactly what politically bankrupt outfits always do – grabbed someone else’s name, manufactured a narrative around it, and tried to sell it as political courage.
Aadhav claimed DMK threatened Rajinikanth into staying out of politics. But his Vijay? He bows to no one, it seems. Does he not remember the viral video where Vijay was standing with folded hands begging the then-CM Jayalalithaa to help him release his film? Memory loss maybe. Ok, set that aside for a moment.
Let us rewind a bit. Aadhav Arjuna was a DMK member before jumping ship to VCK and then TVK. He says that the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam threatened Rajinikanth to keep him out of the 2021 Assembly elections — even though Aadhav Arjuna himself was with the DMK at the time.
Was he present when these alleged threats were issued? Did he participate? Is he confessing to involvement while framing it as an accusation? Because if this information is true, he was inside the machinery that allegedly did it. And if it is false, he fabricated a defamatory story on a public stage with Joseph Vijay’s full knowledge.
Joseph Vijay has not said a word about it since. Not a clarification. Not a distancing statement. Nothing. In politics, silence after a subordinate’s public statement is endorsement. Vijay owns this. People who have followed Vijay’s career to some extent will know that Vijay is a self-confessed Rajinikanth fan who drew deep inspiration from the superstar, most famously when he recreated the iconic challenge dialogue from Rajinikanth’s film Annamalai, recorded it on video, and showed it to his reluctant father SA Chandrasekhar who was so impressed that he agreed to launch Vijay in Naalaiya Theerpu (1992).
Vijay has publicly called Rajinikanth his biggest inspiration on multiple occasions, even picking Naan Sigappu Manidhan, the only Rajinikanth film directed by his father, as his favourite from his father’s entire filmography. However, while Rajinikanth himself had modelled his early career after Amitabh Bachchan, Vijay similarly drew from Rajinikanth in his formative years before eventually carving out his own distinct identity as “Thalapathy” with energetic dance numbers, youth-oriented films, and social messaging becoming one of Tamil cinema’s biggest stars in his own right.
And yet, Aadhav, with the silent affirmation from Vijay, fired his salvo on the same Rajinikanth.
The Facts TVK Did Not Bother Checking
Rajinikanth’s withdrawal from politics is documented public record. In December 2020, he announced he would not launch his party, citing his own health – he had just been hospitalised in Hyderabad with severe blood pressure fluctuations, was on immunosuppressant medication following a 2016 kidney transplant, and his doctors had warned him against Covid-19 exposure risk. He called it a “warning from God.” In July 2021, he formally dissolved the Rajini Makkal Mandram. That Rajini excused himself from politics citing health reasons while going on to act in film produced by DMK family is a debate for another day. May be he realized that mere star power is not enough to pull people to the poll booth.
But Aadhav Arjuna did not offer an alternate interpretation of events. He invented one from scratch with zero evidence and delivered it as fact from a party platform. And it was served to the public by a party whose leader sat quietly and let it happen – the same guy whose career launch was because of Rajinikanth.
What TVK Actually Is
Strip away the film star’s face and what does TVK have?
Its voter base is a converted fan following – made of obsessive sycophants as cadre, not a political constituency built through years of grassroots work. Its ideological framework is recycled DMK vocabulary: social justice, Dravidian identity, caste equity repackaged with a newer, younger aesthetic.
The “Courage” Argument Collapses Under Scrutiny
Aadhav Arjuna’s point was simple: Rajinikanth feared DMK, Vijay does not.
But what exactly has Vijay done that requires courage?
He has not faced a single press meet. He has only participated in cadre meets and political meetings with his cadre. He has not participated in any debates or any media conclaves. Instead, he had a closed-door discussion with the NDTV team who then discussed the discussion they had! Wow.
Vijay has not met with any political party leaders; it is alleged that he has a wall of a few people around him and message passes on to him through them. He has not contested a single election. He has not lost anything. He has not sacrificed anything. He has not governed anything.
Claiming that he quit his career at his peak and said he has sacrificed a lot is laughable – has he quit living a luxurious life? Is he sleeping on the pavement and living life like an underprivileged citizen of this country?
Vijay has absorbed public adulation and wants more of it; he has held large rallies, made scripted speeches – most often after the first 10-15 minutes he starts looking at the paper to help him remember the script. He makes tall claims in his speeches, quotes random data only to get fact-checked later. That is not courage. That is just a mishmash.
Rajinikanth, whatever one thinks of his political career, made a public call, took the criticism for it, and did not blame anyone else for his decision. That required more political spine than anything TVK has demonstrated in its entire existence.
The Real Pattern Here
This is not the first time Joseph Vijay has used Rajinikanth as a ladder. He has been doing it his entire career. The only thing that has changed is the arena.
When Vijay was clawing his way up in Tamil cinema, he did not build a new identity – he photocopied an existing one. The mass hero template, the slow-motion entry, the fan culture machinery, the superstar mythology – Rajinikanth had constructed all of it brick by brick over thirty years of genuine struggle. Vijay walked in, reverse-engineered the blueprint, and sold it back to a younger audience as something fresh. His fans will deny this furiously. The filmography does not.
He spent two decades in cinema living in Rajinikanth’s shadow, desperately trying to step out of it and never fully succeeding. Every time a Vijay film was positioned as a “mass entertainer,” every time his fans called him “Thalapathy” and built a superstar cult around him, they were operating inside a framework Rajinikanth had already invented. Vijay did not disrupt Tamil cinema’s hero model. He franchised it.
And now, in politics, the man has done it again.
TVK has no original ideology. It has no governance vision, it has no political identity that exists independently of its leader’s film stardom – the same stardom, incidentally, that was itself constructed in the image of someone else.
So when TVK needed media oxygen on March 11, when its ‘politics’ (or the lack of it) was not generating sufficient heat on its own, what did it do? It sent Aadhav Arjuna to a stage to fabricate a story about Rajinikanth being threatened into silence with zero shame. Not because the story is true. But because Rajinikanth’s name in a headline guarantees attention that TVK’s own name cannot.
This is the full arc of Joseph Vijay’s career in one sentence: he has never been able to generate his own gravity, so he has always orbited someone else’s.
In cinema, he orbited Rajinikanth’s stardom and called it inspiration. In politics, he is orbiting Rajinikanth’s reputation and calling it courage. The only difference is that this time, the borrowing comes with defamation attached.
A man who spent his entire film career trying to become Tamil Nadu’s next Rajinikanth is now trying to build his political career by tearing Rajinikanth down. The irony would be funny if the lie was not so deliberate.
The 2026 Mandate for Rajini Fans
Crores of Rajinikanth fans exist across Tamil Nadu. They are not a monolith. They vote across party lines. Many of them had initially looked at TVK with curiosity – a new face, a clean slate, a chance at change.
That goodwill has now been squandered on a stage speech.
Rajini fans in 2026 have one task: wherever TVK contests, make them lose their deposit. Not a narrow loss. A loss that sends an unambiguous message – you do not use Rajinikanth’s name as a stepladder for your leader’s political ambitions and expect to walk away with votes.
Tamil Nadu’s voters are sharp. They understand the difference between a leader who stepped back to protect lives and a party that drags his name through controversy to manufacture relevance.
In 2026, let the ballot deliver the verdict.
Vijay deserves a defeat so humiliating that he is reminded of his place — the same man who once stood outside Jayalalithaa’s residence should again find himself outside Rajini’s Poes Garden with his tail tucked between his legs.
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