CHENNAI: The first thing that greets you when you walk into the Voice of Commons office is a quote on the wall: “If you do not interfere in politics, politics will eventually interfere in your life.”
Step further in and a red sofa sits against a sprawling black-and-white mural of Periyar, Ambedkar and Gandhi, alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, Bhagat Singh, Karl Marx, and other reformers and revolutionaries. Opposite the sofa, hangs a framed copy of the Preamble.
Walk past that, and you enter the main floor with rows of workstations in yellow and maroon, the colours of TVK, stretching across a large open office. On the far wall, a life-size cutout of Vijay, arms wide open, smiles over the room. In the workspace, mobile phones rang incessantly, some people glued to screens, others pacing and talking for hours. For anyone who walked in unannounced, it could easily have looked like a social media shop of a political outfit, where voters are wooed by Instagram reels and stories.
But, the ‘war room’ of Voice of Commons (VoC), that worked for Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam and headed by Aadhav Arjuna, was doing far more. At the core of it was chief strategist Kapil Sahu, working with a team of around 40 people — field researchers and on-ground analysts — supported by a wider network of ghostwriters and social media strategists. The team was young, mostly filled with Gen Z recruits, fresh out of college with no prior political experience.
Together, they spent nearly a year dismantling the strongholds of the Dravidian parties that ruled the state alternately since 1967. Their first task was to tap into anti-incumbency sentiment, not just among voters, but within the ranks of the Dravidian parties themselves. “It was, in a way, true that there was no anti-incumbency. But that is macro politics, visible only on the surface. Deep inside, there was anti-incumbency and anti-DMK sentiment. We worked on that,” a VoC strategist told TNIE.
The groundwork was laid around June 2025. Field teams fanned out across all 234 constituencies to map the anti-incumbency, to document all pieces of information from the two Dravidian parties. They documented potential candidates from both the major parties and their allies, tracked internal factionalism, profiled sitting MLAs and recorded the resentments of their own associates.
“Factionalism within the Dravidian parties was the first thing that helped us narrow down issues. That is also where our candidate hunt began. Disgruntled workers from both the DMK and AIADMK competed with each other to give us information,” said a strategist who worked in one of the southern districts under the guise of a researcher. Defectors and disgruntled insiders were not incidental to the campaign strategy; they were actively identified and deployed.
In Thiruverumbur, Navalpattu Viji, once a close associate of former minister Anbil Mahesh Poyyamozhi, was identified as someone who wanted to see his former friend lose. In Kolathur, VS Babu, a former DMK MLA, came in through the same process. So did S Keerthana, now a minister, who had earlier worked with Aadhav Arjuna during the DMK’s 2021 campaign. “It was the same with Karuppaiah of Sholavandan, and several others,” said another strategist who worked across the central and delta regions.
The net was cast wide to identify potential candidates. AIADMK veterans like KA Sengottaiyan, V Sathyabama and JCD Prabhakar, now Speaker of the Assembly, were brought in through this mapping exercise. “The party took the liberty of choosing candidates beyond dominant castes. At the same time, it did not risk fielding Dalits in general constituencies. Apart from caste, political and financial background were also considered. General secretaries N Anand, Aadhav Arjuna and KA Sengottaiyan had their say, while Vijay took the final call,” a consultant involved in shortlisting candidates told TNIE.
The party fielded 37 from the Vanniyar community, 25 from the Mukkulathor communities, 12 Muslims and 10 Christians, including five Christian Nadars in the south. “It is a bitter truth that we had to bypass some deserving Dalit district secretaries and give seats to candidates from numerically dominant castes, keeping electoral arithmetic in mind,” the consultant said.
Of TVK’s 120 district secretaries, at least 16 were Dalits. AS Pazhani of Central Chennai (West), K Manikandan of Thiruvallur Central district, and Tirupathur East district secretary Navin Kumar were among the Dalit district secretaries denied tickets.
Beyond politicians, local business communities that had allegedly felt squeezed by the Dravidian parties quietly funded and mobilised campaign resources. “For instance, in Kallakurichi, C Arul Vignesh was supported by a private school in the locality for logistics, because the school was affected in some way by the Dravidian parties,” an analyst who worked with VoC told TNIE. “Similarly, a restaurant owner, textile and garment businessmen, and operators of schools and colleges helped at the local level,” the analyst said.
Writers and political strategists who had worked for the DMK in 2021 also found their way into the TVK orbit. Fielding independent activists as candidates was another deliberate strategy. “While Arul Arumugam was fielded in Tiruvannamalai, activists and Ambedkarite movements in Coimbatore and Chennai chose to stay within the DMK fold but quietly fed information to the VoC team,” another field worker said.
While Kapil Sahu’s team handled field strategy, it was Jhon Arokiasamy’s JPAC persona that set the tone on social media. “We did not want our IT wing to do it. Content generation and narrative-setting were decided by Jhon. It was then fed to virtual warriors,” a social media analyst told TNIE.
Sources close to Jhon said he was also involved in shaping Vijay’s speeches, including tone and duration. “It was Jhon who had ghostwriters for writing the speeches and, of course, the contents were fed by Jhon and his team alongside Vijay’s own inputs,” the source said.Asked about Vijay’s negatives, a team leader smiled and said, “That is for the Dravidian parties to answer and not us.”
Less is more
Those who worked for VoC say the campaign strategy was never about working hard, but working tactically. “By now, all might have known, the strategy was simple: less Vijay, more craze, and he also believed in the same,” a strategist told TNIE. That explains, at least in part, why TVK cancelled rally plans despite securing permission in at least 11 places. The decision was not purely a political calculation. After the Karur tragedy, security protocols were tightened considerably under Gentur Security Services, headed by Nayeem Moosa. “Nayeem was the man who would give a green signal to proceed. The thumb rule was, if Nayeem says no, even Vijay will not overrule it,” the analyst said. The deliberate restraint on Vijay’s public appearances, the team says, also worked in their favour because the political parties, the media, the rival parties, and the commentators underestimated him. “People kept saying he cannot speak, he is not calling the shots. Those assumptions worked in our favour,” said an analyst closely associated with the team.
Karur shock
Even as the VoC team pushed through its weekly campaign work, the first major jolt came from Karur. On September 27, a stampede broke out during a public gathering attended by thousands. In the chaos that followed, 41 people lost their lives. It was the kind of tragedy that could have finished a new party. “But even amid the chaos, we were asked to contact the victims’ families and ask them to record videos about how they felt,” a team member recalled. “Families who lost their dear ones, to whom we spoke, were not against Vijay, but sympathetic towards him. That was the first time we sensed that the negative campaign was not going to work against Vijay,” a team member said. Another associate credited much of the damage control to Vijay’s close aide Jagadish Palaniswamy. “He has been working on Vijay’s films since 2016. Initially, he worked with PR teams. Since 2020, he has directly handled those operations through his network,” the associate said, adding that it was this team that doused negative sentiments against Vijay on social media.
The believers
While no one outside believed TVK would win, three people inside the war room never wavered. “It was Vijay sir and Aadhav sir who firmly believed that TVK would form a government. Before the two of them, it was Jhon who had been saying it from Day 1, but it was taken as the enthusiasm of a believer and not the calculation of a strategist,” a senior strategist who closely worked with the leaders told TNIE. That conviction, the team said, came from Vijay himself. He visited the VoC office at least five times over the course of that year. “He does not miss saying goodbye to even a single person before leaving. Even if he misses, which is rare, he makes sure that he gives a smile and says bye to that person next time,” an analyst said.