Behind Vijay, six young guns: Digital creators to organisers, backroom players to Chennai MLAs

‘Bussy’ Anand

At the centre of Vijay’s inner circle is N “Bussy” Anand, 61, the TVK’s general secretary and newly-elected MLA from Chennai’s T Nagar constituency.

Anand is older than most TVK MLAs – with the average age of the newly elected party legislators being 45 years – and younger than ex-AIADMK veteran K Sengottaiayan, 78, who is now with the TVK. However, among the party’s emerging leaders, he comes across as another young face. If Vijay is absent from a district event, it is often Anand who attracts the crowd. In many TVK gatherings, party workers speak of him less as a conventional functionary and more as their movement’s operational heartbeat – the leader who can both calm the cadre and electrify them.

Anand, who hails from Puducherry, first entered politics as a constituency-level organiser and later represented Puducherry’s Bussy Assembly seat in 2006 as the Puducherry Munnetra Congress (PMC) legislator – a win that attached the locality’s name to his name.

Before joining the TVK, he did a stint with the All India NR Congress (AINRC), but his real political capital emerged from Vijay’s fan club ecosystem: blood donation drives, welfare work, relief activities and the dense social network that transformed cinema fandom into a proto-political infrastructure.

When Vijay formally launched the TVK in 2024, Anand became his de facto No. 2. In the 2026 elections, he pulled off one of the party’s most significant wins, symbolically, from T Nagar with a margin of over 13,000 votes.

For the TVK loyalists, Anand represents the possibility that a fan association can evolve into a real political machine.

John Arokiasamy

If Anand is the party’s organiser, John Arokiasamy, 53, is its poll strategist. The Andhra Pradesh-born political consultant, educated in English literature in Tiruchi and trained in business administration in Chennai, joined the TVK fold after years of quietly working for various political brands across South India.

Before shaping Vijay’s outfit, Arokiasamy had advised leaders including the PMK’s Anbumani Ramadoss, Naam Tamilar Katchi’s Seeman,

Siddaramaiah during his first term as the Karnataka Chief Minister, and the erstwhile undivided Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thakeray. In Tamil political circles, he developed a reputation as a strategist who understood not just slogans, but atmosphere: how a leader should look, sound, trend and emotionally connect.

Through his firm JPACPersona, he helped design the TVK’s first statewide election architecture through 2025. The Tamil television panels now routinely call him Vijay’s “Chanakya”, the backstage mind who helped translate a mass-hero persona into a structured political identity.

Arun Raj

Then there is Dr K G Arun Raj, 42, who is among the TVK’s most technocratic leaders. A medical doctor who later joined the Indian Revenue Service in 2009, Arun Raj spent years in the Income Tax Department before taking voluntary retirement and joining the TVK in 2025 as its propaganda and policy general secretary.

Inside the party, he plays a hybrid role – part policy architect, part television debater, part institutional-builder. The DMK repeatedly alleged that he led the 2020 IT raids against Vijay, a charge denied by both Arun Raj and the TVK. But the controversy only enhanced his visibility, turning him into one of the party’s most recognisable English-speaking faces.

Aadhav Arjuna

If Arun Raj represents structure in the TVK, Aadhav Arjuna, 44, manages mobilisation. Son-in-law of lottery baron Santiago Martin, Arjuna was a former insider of the DMK’s first family circles, who closely worked with its chief M K Stalin’s son-in-law Sabareesan. Later, after the DMK reportedly denied him an MP seat, he joined Thol Thirumavalavan’s Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi (VCK), before joining the TVK in 2025. If his exit from the DMK fold was bitter, his fallout with Thirumavalavan was dramatic. Arjuna now heads the TVK’s election campaign management and oversees its booth-level organisation, candidate screening and field training.

Arjuna, who is also the Basketball Federation of India president, brings a distinctly social justice vocabulary into the TVK. He appears to speak the language of youth mobilisation, Ambedkarite politics and Periyarist critique, while seeking to professionalise Vijay’s campaign machinery. In this election, he won from Chennai’s Villivakkam seat, giving the TVK another urban foothold.

Nirmal Kumar

The TVK’s deputy general secretary for IT and social media, CTR Nirmal Kumar, 44, has also played a key role in setting up the party’s campaign architecture. A former BJP digital war-room operator who later briefly joined the AIADMK, Nirmal eventually landed in Vijay’s camp, convinced that the TVK could become the state’s third force.

His contribution to Vijay’s triumph lies in transforming fandom into algorithm. Under him, the TVK’s meme networks, WhatsApp chains and volunteer ecosystems evolved into a disciplined digital force for shaping narrative velocity during the election cycle.

Rajmohan Arumugam

Another figure embracing the TVK’s attempt to merge politics with internet-era communication is Rajmohan Arumugam, whose rise speaks as much about changing media culture as it does about the party itself.

Rajmohan did not emerge from district secretary meetings or decades of party apprenticeship. He came instead through screens, satire and the conversational intimacy of Tamil social media. Before becoming the TVK’s propaganda secretary, he was already familiar to younger audiences as a comedian, actor, motivational speaker and digital creator with a sharp instinct for social commentary.

His public identity was shaped in the world of Put Chutney and later Tamil Vannakam – platforms that helped redefine how urban Tamil millennials consumed humour, politics and cultural criticism online. That background gives Rajmohan a very different political rhythm from traditional Dravidian spokesmen. He does not speak in slogan-heavy cadences, he speaks in the language of memes, irony, conversational outrage and relatable humour. Inside the TVK, that skill is viewed as strategic capital. His role is not merely to propagate the party’s ideas, but to translate them into content that travels naturally through reels, YouTube clips, WhatsApp forwards and short-form political conversations.

Born and raised in Chennai, Rajmohan first gained public attention after winning Tamil Pechu Engal Moochu Season 2 before moving through radio, TV and digital media into politics. That journey – from public-speaking reality shows to online commentary, to party propaganda – mirrors the TVK’s own attempt to construct a new kind of political culture. In many ways, Rajmohan embodies the hybrid grammar the party is trying to build: somewhere between satire and seriousness, entertainment and agitation, meme and manifesto.