The two weeks that EPS took fending off the Sengottaiyan rebellion has since become lost time for the AIADMK as that was also the time Vijay took to go all-out against Stalin and the DMK, observes N Sathiya Moorthy.
Poll-bound Tamil Nadu's AIADMK boss Edappadi K Palaniswami should have been elated.
In a way, he has become the first regional leader in the country to have put the Bharatiya Janata Party's chief strategist Amit Shah in his place.
But the two weeks that he took to do it have turned out to be equally critical.
TVK's actor-founder Vijay used the time and space, all pre-determined by weeks, to try and fill what some observers thought was an emerging political vacuum, which the AIADMK and EPS had filled in recent months.
To be fair to EPS, his weeks-long tour of a majority of assembly constituencies in a first-round poll campaign was a greater success than his critics, both within the party and outside, were ready to concede.
But then, the tail-end of the campaign tour suffered a slight image loss after party veteran and his one-time mentor K A Sengottaiyan went to town, urging EPS to re-unite the old party by admitting estranged leaders like three-time chief minister O Pannerselvam, one-time strategist T T V Dinakaran and the late Jayalalithaa's confidante V K Sasikala Natarajan.
In doing so, Sengottaiyan blotted the copy book by meeting Amit Shah and Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, herself a Tamil, after EPS, acting swiftly, had sacked him from all party posts barring the primary membership.
The question then arose, not about Sengottaiyan and his mission, but about the propriety of top BJP leaders giving time to an AIADMK dissident and about the kind of message that the Shah-Sitharaman duo were sending.
It is anybody's guess who initiated the meeting, but as was to be expected, EPS met Shah in Delhi, first with a group of party leaders, followed by a so-called one-on-one, in which his son and also a Chennai-based builder were present, the latter supposedly as an interpreter.
If this caused eyebrows to raise, the ultimate outcome was that EPS put his foot down on re-admitting the three or at least two dissidents, as there is no record about one-time Chinna Amma Sasikala wanting to return.
That was victory enough for EPS as in the first round, he was seemingly forced by Shah to agree to revive their poll alliance after EPS had broken it on the eve of the Lok Sabha elections last year.
By the time his campaign tour ended, EPS found out for himself that the AIADMK too needed the alliance if he had to return as chief minister next year -- another vexatious and unsettled issue between the two allies, what with Shah and other Delhi leaders continuing to send confusing signals.
But that was not all. Team EPS had concluded that there was greater acceptance of their leader as the party boss among AIADMK cadres.
It was seemingly in doubt after he was seen as being weak when Shah purportedly forced down alliance-revival down EPS's throat in April this year.
According to insider reports, Team EPS also concluded that the way the cadres and also voters were swinging away from the ruling DMK under Chief Minister M K Stalin, owing to multiple anti-incumbency issues, that the AIADMK could now consider the option of snapping ties with the BJP if it became the only option.
Of course, in their minds was the possibility of reviving alliance talks with Vijay's TVK, which had to end when Amit Shah intervened in April.
That delay and rethink may have cost EPS and the AIADMK crucial time and electoral space.
The two weeks that EPS took fending off the Sengottaiyan rebellion has since become lost time for the AIADMK as that was also the time Vijay took, and the political space that he needed to go all out against Stalin and the DMK.
Yes, Vijay's weekend campaigns are the butt of social media memes, projecting him as a 'non-serious, part-time' politician.
His refusal to wade into the youthful crowds, his seeming unwillingness to replace the 'bouncers' guarding him with local TVK leaders to give them a greater identity, and even deep-throated speeches, full of one-liners 'practised through the week' and his constant reference to the text of the speech that he holds in his hands are all dampeners.
Yet, since the TVK's second state conference in Madurai, followed since by weekend tours of Tiruchi and Perambalur, Nagapattinam and Tiruvarur, have come to establish his brand of politics and politicking -- sending out a clear, 'take-it-or-leave-it' message.
But it is his hard-hitting attacks on the DMK and Stalin's government leadership that should be a cause for concern for EPS and the AIADMK.
Definitely, Vijay through two weekends of his campaign tour has made the state to look up and take notice.
If his ignoring the AIADMK was earlier considered as his keeping his alliance options open, now the message is different.
Vijay wants to establish, as he has been claiming through the last two years of his party's existence, that elections 2026 was between the DMK and the TVK -- and there was no space for a third force, say, the AIADMK, the BJP or the two of them together, as has happened since.
It is anybody's guess if the crowds that gather for Vijay's campaign tours are all going to turn into votes, and even so, if they would (be able to) multiply into the kind of vote-share and seat-share that the TVK would need to stay afloat post-poll, and stay afloat without having to join hands with another party for the Lok Sabha polls of 2029.
The doubts are not without justification. In the past, the late actor-politician Vijayakanth was always available to his fans, later cadres, and the general public, even before he floated the DMDK, which is now in its last leg.
Vijayakanth drew huge crowds, yes, mixed crowds that comprised the young and old alike.
If this kind of mix is visibly unavailable at Vijay's rallies, Vijayakanth also found himself left high and dry after polling a very respectable eight per cent vote-share in 2006 assembly elections, up by two per cent, to ten-plus in the Lok Sabha polls of 2009, where he did not even have a prime ministerial candidate.
It was all about staying power and the realisation that for a third force to break the ten-per cent vote-share barrier in Tamil Nadu was not an option.
Vijayakanth joined hands with the AIADMK under Jayalalithaa for the 2011 assembly elections, she returned as CM, he became leader of the Opposition as the DMDK had won more seats than the outgoing DMK.
But the DMK had staying power, as Jayalalithaa too found out after trouncing the party in the 1991 elections, in the aftermath of the Rajiv Gandhi assassination.
For now, all these are for a post-poll analysis in the Vijay camp, which has strategists and propagandists occupying main positions at the top, and who alone seem to be having his ear.
There are no established political leaders who know the nuances of poll-day politics at the ground level better. Even TVK General Secretary N Anand was a former MLA in the adjoining Union Territory of Puducherry with little or no knowledge of Tamil Nadu politics.
By declaring at his Madurai rally that the cadres and voters should consider him as the candidate in each of the 234 constituencies, and also acting accordingly by not promoting any local leader alongside in his campaign vehicle, Vijay may have proved just as much.
It's going to increase the inherent limitations within which his party and cadres have to act at their own levels.
It is this that is still going to be problematic for EPS. If he does not win this election for the party, the AIADMK may have to look elsewhere for a charismatic leader.
There are fears that it may also be the beginning of the end for the party -- and the BJP ally would devour the AIADMK before the 2029 Lok Sabha polls.
By the next assembly polls in 2031, EPS will be 77, and the party would have to look for an alternative anyway.
Vijay, 51, with a substantial number of seats and vote-share, if he gets both, will then have age on his side.
For now however, EPS has emerged as a strong leader capable of and willing to take on the national ally, that too a strong-man like Amit Shah, purportedly with his tactics.
It is the kind of image that 'Amma' Jayalalithaa had cast around her, but with a difference.
It was rare to see Jaya smiling in public after she took to politics. EPS is all smiles all the time, even when he is stressed out by allies and party colleagues.
This strong-man image has the potential to show up EPS as the right man to take on Stalin, which the anti-DMK social media has been projecting as a weak and indecisive leader and political administrator -- unlike his father, the late M Karunanidhi.
After his stern refusal to readmit the prodigals despite repeated interventions by the all-powerful Amit Shah, Team EPS expects the TN voter to make the comparison with Stalin on the 'tough man' perspective.
The DMK seems unconcerned, and points to the way their chief minister has been cocking a snook at the Centre, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the whole lot of them.
There is a point in the AIADMK's assumption. But there is greater point for both of them.
That Vijay, if he is able to sustain the current momentum and also build upon it, can cut into the anti-DMK votes of the AIADMK-BJP combine, a share of the anti-BJP vote, especially of the minorities, that has now rested with the DMK and a substantial share of the youth vote that is now with the NTK's Seeman, especially for his daring way and despite an unending series of controversies involving his name.
There is also the substantial near-30 per cent swing-votes over the post-MGR assembly polls of 1989, who have been swaying mostly one way since, and have been the decisive factor, through and through.
They are independent of the 10 per cent voters keen to give any newcomer a chance -- from the DMK in 1957 to the DMDK in 2006/2009, and Seeman in more recent times, mainly after he had proved his staying power through failed elections.
But then there are those who still argue or want to cite the examples of actor-politicians Kamal Hassan with his MNM, Sarath Kumar who has since merged his AISMK with the BJP, leading to his popular actor-wife Radhika contesting the Virudunagar seat, only to come a poor third.
In the midst of it all, local pollsters and political pundits, who took their cue from psephologist Prashant Kishor who gave Vijay an 18 per cent voter support even before the TVK had gone to town and went on to address the party's inaugural conference last year, are now unsure whether to attest him or contest his claims.
But they too are learning that Vijay may have launched a 21st century campaign-model, where a million-strong crowd for political rallies is a distant dream from the 1950s to the 1970s and 1980s but not anymore.
Yet, it all depends on how and how much inroads that Vijay is capable of making and how much of lost political space the AIADMK and EPS, that too in the BJP's company, is able to retrieve.
Until then, there is a perception that the DMK can afford to sit pretty, a perception that may not be supported entirely by what is actually visible even to the naked eye.
N Sathiya Moorthy, veteran journalist and author, is a Chennai-based policy analyst and political commentator.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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