Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan is not one to hide what he feels. At a public event on Monday, the actor-turned-politician made a candid admission that drew both laughter and reflection, watching Tamil Nadu’s new Chief Minister Vijay waltz into power had made him a little jealous.
Addressing Janasena party members, Kalyan cast a glance at the neighbouring state and could not help but compare notes. “I look at Tamil politics these days; they’ve done it so carefree. I felt jealous. They won using cutouts and holograms happily,” he said with a laugh, before turning serious. “I have been wandering the streets for fifteen years
The contrast he was drawing was hard to miss. Vijay, who launched his party TVK only in 2024, contested the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections and secured 108 seats, enough to make TVK the single largest party and end decades of dominance by the DMK and AIADMK. He became Chief Minister in 2026, barely two years after entering politics.
Kalyan’s own journey has been considerably harder. He founded Janasena in 2014, and the party’s early years were bruising. In the 2019 general elections, Janasena won just one Lok Sabha seat, and Kalyan himself lost in both constituencies he contested. Critics openly questioned whether the party had any future at all.
He refused to walk away. Over the years, Kalyan rebuilt Janasena from the ground up, eventually forging an alliance with the BJP and the Telugu Desam Party. The patience paid off in the 2024 Andhra Pradesh elections, when Janasena contested all 21 Assembly seats and won every single one, a 100 per cent strike rate that few parties can claim. Kalyan also won personally from Pithapuram by more than 70,000 votes, his first-ever Assembly victory, and went on to become Deputy Chief Minister.
On Monday, he put the difficulty of that journey into plain words. “Managing a political party means uniting hundreds of thousands of people. We can’t even get our own family members to agree on a single thing,” he said, adding, “Starting a party and attempting to transform society was a massive risk.”
He had made a similar point earlier this month at an event in Amaravati, telling party workers that Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu are simply not comparable politically, and that his alliance-based approach was the right one for his state, even if it demanded more time and patience.
The broader story Kalyan represents is, of course, a familiar one in South Indian politics. NT Rama Rao, MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa all made the journey from cinema to the chief minister’s chair before him. Vijay is the latest to follow that path. Kalyan has got there too, just by a longer, harder road.
