As Tamil Nadu votes in two bypolls, Vijay's government faces its first political test. The contest has become a wider argument over defections, welfare and whether TVK offers anything truly new.
Vijay came in with the promise of a generational change in politics and administration. But his government's response to the Sathankulam highway signboard did not require Tamil Nadu to behave as if a column of Hindi-speaking soldiers had crossed the Karumeni river. He could still articulate the doctrine that this century requires: no imposition from Delhi, no prohibition from Chennai.
In politics, you don't always kill rivals by direct assault; sometimes, labelling them an irrelevant branch office does the job better and Vijay shows he knows how to do it.
How allegations of child sexual abuse, media voyeurism, and suspected institutional complicity collided with electoral realpolitik.
How the party of protests mutated into a quasi-AIADMK, chased a 1976 ghost, and lost the plot to a generation that scrolls.
Vijay will not lose much sleep over the Madhurantkam and Dharapuram bye-elections. A bitterly divided opposition and a five-cornered contest will ensure that in this farce of an election.
The DMK turned Vijay's Assembly provocation over MISA and the Sarkaria Commission into a full-blown political fight. The row shifted attention from the 140-day-old TVK government's record and exposed the Opposition's disconnect with present-day voters.
Vijay showed he could command his benches and keep a battle-hardened Opposition pinned in its own half. But his delivery revealed acoustic excess. Celluloid rewards the line that silences the villain; a legislature requires the sentence that survives the reply. His frequency was political, his decibel cinematic.
The Tamil Nadu Assembly has just passed a unanimous resolution asking the Centre to include a walled caste count column rather than an open column. Why is the state worried?
A commanding performance turned a police-grants reply into political theatre. The applause was real; the tests of proof, policing and power begin after the credits.
Fort St George is a fine heritage building but ill-equipped to house a government of eight crore people. How must Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay go about looking for a new place?
The Tamil Nadu government has banned mobiles from the premises of 52 temples. While the Gods must be relieved that temples will now be less about content creation and more about devotion, administering the ban might require nothing less than divine grace.
With the Parandur airport project, Chief Minister Vijay closed an ongoing project. Can he do the reverse with Vedanta's Sterlite plant? Can he reopen a closed chapter? Thoothukudi, Tamil Nadu and India can do with a green and safe copper behemoth.
Cities pay for aviation bottlenecks through international routes that never materialize, air-freight logistics that divert to competing gateways, and global manufacturers that alter their investment calculations. Chennai's second airport cannot be on permanent hold.
Chief Minister Vijay used the Southern Zonal Council meeting with Amit Shah to press Tamil Nadu's stand on delimitation, Cauvery and NEET. The exchange underlined that a changed political cast has not altered the State's long-running federal disputes with New Delhi.
Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C. Joseph Vijay announced official vehicles and monthly allowances for all 234 MLAs in the state assembly. The move drew visible cross-party enthusiasm while also prompting questions over fiscal priorities and the universal nature of the benefit.
A fresh Karnataka-Tamil Nadu flashpoint has emerged over the deaths of three suspected poachers in Karnataka's Chamarajanagar district. Their families claimed the men were searching for missing livestock. The forest may be dark. The law cannot afford to be.
An insurgent actor-politician has breached the DMK-AIADMK stronghold, winning 108 seats at the head of a fragile coalition. But while the face of power at Fort St. George has changed, the bigger question is whether the fundamentals of Tamil Nadu's governance have changed with it - or merely its style.
Once again, a premier female artist has been turned into cheap collateral damage in a high-stakes duel between male political heavyweights. Yet, those who view this incident merely as a partisan skirmish or a fleeting electoral misstep miss the broader, far more alarming picture.
CM Vijay's first two months in office suggest that Tamil Nadu's politics might be entering a new federal phase. While the state's positions on issues such as NEET, language and fiscal devolution remain unchanged, its engagement with the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led Central government has become markedly more pragmatic.
