Signalling support for Vijay's Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam (TVK) in forming Tamil Nadu government — a move that has drawn sharp criticism from its long-time ally, the DMK, the Indian National Congress (INC) is reportedly close to ending one of its longest political alliances in Tamil Nadu.
The Congress and the DMK have fought elections together in Tamil Nadu for most of the past two decades, sweeping all 39 Lok Sabha seats in the state as recently as 2024 as part of the INDIA bloc. But the 2026 Assembly election has upended that calculus entirely.
TVK won 108 seats in the 234-member House on its debut, emerging as the single largest party, while the DMK was routed to 59 seats and its ally Congress returned just five.
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With Vijay formally requesting Congress's support to form a government, the party high command convened at the residence of president Mallikarjun Kharge in Delhi on Tuesday, where senior leaders including Rahul Gandhi and Tamil Nadu in-charge Girish Chodankar deliberated the situation.
Congress General Secretary KC Venugopal confirmed that the party had directed the Tamil Nadu Congress Committee to take a final call, adding that the mandate in the state was clearly for a secular government — language widely read as a green light to shift allegiances.
The DMK did not receive the development quietly. DMK spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai publicly called Congress "backstabbers" on social media — a rare, unvarnished attack on a party that had shared power and platforms with the DMK for years. The label was striking in its bluntness, suggesting that within the DMK, the sense of betrayal runs deep.
Chodankar, in a candid admission that laid bare the tensions within the party, acknowledged that the decision to contest alongside the DMK had gone against strong grassroots sentiment favouring TVK.
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The Congress's pivot, if formalised, would mark far more than a post-poll manoeuvre. It would signal the effective collapse of the DMK-Congress alliance in Tamil Nadu and a reordering of opposition politics in the state.
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