'Power Star' says he's jealous of Vijay's Tamil Nadu political debut: ‘Won using holograms’

ANdhra Pradesh surrogate chief government minister Pawan Kalyan has candidly said he is overjealous of buster actor-politician Vijay, who lately became the CM of Tamil Nadu after a blockbuster debut at the ballot.Kalyan, himself a star of the Telugu film industry which is India's biggest after Hindi, noted that he had to work for 15 years before he got success as a politician."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, NDTV reported on Tuesday. Addressing party members at an event, he added, "I have been wandering the streets for 15 years."Pawan Kalyan's long political journeyKalyan established his Jana Sena Party (JSP) in March 2014 but did not enter the Lok Sabha contest at the time. Now, it is the second-largest party in the Andhra Pradesh assembly, and thus a key constituent of the state's ruling coalition led by the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu. The Centre's ruling BJP is a junior partner in the state as part of the NDA, which came to power in Andhra in 2024.Kalyan reportedly said further at the party event, “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 he took a massive risk by starting a party and attempting to transform society.In its initial year, when the party chose not to contest elections directly, Pawan Kalyan campaigned aggressively for the TDP and BJP alliance. The NDA alliance won a decisive victory in the 2014 Andhra assembly polls, propelling Naidu to power in the state as it remained after Telangana was carved out.After four years focusing on building the itself as a party that championed local causes, Kalyan severed ties with the NDA citing the Modi government's failure to grant Special Category status to Andhra Pradesh. The party faced a near-fatal blow during its electoral debut in 2019. Contesting independently alongside Left parties and the BSP, the JSP won just one out of 137 assembly seats contested as the YSRCP won the state. Kalyan lost both of the seats he contested, and his sole 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 and assembly elections evidently prevented anti-incumbency vote from splitting, and he ended up as deputy CM. The JSP now has achieved 100% strike rate by winning all 21 assembly and two Lok Sabha seats it contested.Parallels and comparisons with TNKalyan's “jealousy” comment now comes even as earlier this month, after Vijay had won, Kalyan refused to compare the politics of the two neighbouring southern states, Andhra and Tamil Nadu. He had said at that event that his alliance-based approach made more sense in Andhra.C Joseph Vijay, active in disaster rescue and other social initiatives, launched his party TVK in 2024 and won 108 seats within two years, just short of majority on its own. With support from the Congress, Left and others, he took oath and thus ended decades of dominance by the Dravidian parties DMK and AIADMK.He has professed to a secular government while Kalyan has visibly taken a Hindutva turn in recent years in line with PM Narendra Modi's BJP regime.Both Kalyan and Vijay are part of a lineage of film stars becoming mega-politicians, particularly in South India. NT Rama Rao in Andhra, and MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu have all served as CMs.Both carry grand nicknames or monikers also as part of a South Indian movie fan tradition, with Kalyan known as ‘Power Star’ and Vijay as ‘Thalapathy’ (commander).