Andhra Pradesh Deputy Chief Minister Pawan Kalyan has candidly said that he is jealous of his fellow actor-politician Vijay, who recently became the CM of Tamil Nadu after making his debut in the polls.
Kalyan, himself a star of the Telugu film industry which is the largest in India after Hindi, pointed out that he had to work for 15 years before achieving success as a politician.
“Look at Tamil politics these days, they did it carelessly. I was jealous. They won happily using cutouts and holograms,” he said, laughing. Addressing party members at an event, he added: “I have been wandering the streets for 15 years.”
Pawan Kalyan’s long political journey
Kalyan founded the Jana Sena Party (JSP) in March 2014 but did not participate in the Lok Sabha contest at that time. Now, the party is the second largest party in the Andhra Pradesh Parliament and thus a key component of the ruling coalition in the state led by Chief Minister N.’s Telugu Desam Party (TDP). Chandrababu Naidu. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party at the Center is a junior partner in the state as part of the NDA, which comes to power in Andhra in 2024.
“Running a political party means uniting hundreds of thousands of people. We can’t even get our family members to agree on one thing,” Kalyan also reportedly said at the party event. He said he took a big risk by creating a party and trying to change society.
In its first year, when the party chose not to contest the elections directly, Pawan Kalyan campaigned vigorously for the TDP-BJP alliance. The NDA alliance won a decisive victory in the 2014 Andhra Assembly elections, propelling Naidu to power in the state as he remained after Telangana’s secession.
After four years of focusing on building itself as a party that champions local issues, Kalyan severed its ties with the NDA over the Modi government’s failure to grant Andhra Pradesh special category status. The party faced a near-fatal blow during its electoral debut in 2019. Contesting independently alongside the Left parties and the BSP, the RJD won only one of the 137 Assembly seats contested as the YSRCP won the state. Kalyan lost both the seats he contested, and the party’s lone MLA eventually defected.
Kalyan then spent another four years rebuilding the JSP, and then rejoined the NDA. The TDP-BJP-JSP alliance ahead of the 2024 general elections and assembly elections clearly prevented a split in the anti-incumbency votes, and he ended up as deputy chief minister. The JSP has now achieved a 100% strike rate by winning all 21 assemblies and two Lok Sabha seats it contested.
Parallels and comparisons with TN
Kalyan’s “jealous” comment now comes as even earlier this month, after Vijay’s victory, Kalyan had refused to compare politics between the two neighboring southern states, Andhra and Tamil Nadu. At the event, he had said that his alliance-based approach made more sense in Andhra.
C Joseph Vijay, an activist for disaster rescue and other social initiatives, launched his party TVK in 2024 and won 108 seats within two years, just short of a majority on his own. With the support of the Congress, the Left and others, he took oath, thus ending decades of dominance by the two Dravidian parties (DMK and AIADMK).
He admitted to a secular government while Kalyan has taken a clear Hindutva turn in recent years in line with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP regime.
Both Kalyan and Vijay are part of a string of film stars who have become major politicians, especially in South India. NT Rama Rao in Andhra, MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, all served as chief ministers.
They both hold grand titles or titles as well as part of the tradition of South Indian film fans, with Kalyan being known as ‘Power Star’ and Vijay as ‘Thalapathy’ (Leader).
