Vijay’s Team Scouting for a Symbol

Chennai: Top honchos of the Tamilga Vetri Kazhagam (TVK) are now focusing on the task of securing a common election symbol for their party as it plans to field candidates in all the 234 constituencies  barring the ones that might be allotted to allies, if any of them join hands before the polls in 2026  and a team is already said to have gone to New Delhi to finalise the process.

Registered in February, 2025, the Assembly elections would be the maiden electoral outing for the TVK that would be eligible to apply for a specific common symbol now. However, it would have to choose a symbol from the pool of symbols held by the Election Commission of India.

To finalise one common symbol for all the party’s candidates, the ECI would have to make a lot of enquiries regarding the use of it by other parties all over India and hence it could be a long drawn process.

So, to circumvent the official process, TVK deputy general secretary C T Nirmal Kumar reportedly left for New Delhi on Tuesday to meet ECI officials and finalise the symbol, which if allotted would be given to the party in December, thus providing them enough time to popularize it through their campaigns.

As per the procedure, the party would have to pick a list of 10 symbols from the ECI’s basket to start with. It is learnt that among the bouquet of symbols now preferred by the party honchos are ‘auto rickshaw,’ ‘cricket bat,’ ‘ship’ and ‘whistle,’ which are objects that the common people could relate to and could also be popularized through wall paintings and hoarding.

Now that the party has put its bugbear, the September 27 stampede at is campaign meeting in Karur, behind it by finding closure to the tragedy by calling the relatives of the victims of catastrophe to a resort in Mahabalipuram and Vijay personally talking to them to apologize and also console them, the party has started its work relating to the elections.

The campaign meetings that have been put on hold would probably resume once the State government came with the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for political rallies, as ordered by the Madras High Court. But in the meantime, the party does not want to postpone the other work like seeking an exclusive common symbol to contest the elections.

Those activities happening in the background indicate Vijay’s keenness to take the electoral plunge in 2026. The party had already announced that it was the alternative to the DMK and has already trained its guns on the ruling party by picking up issues to attack the government.

So unmindful of the criticisms abound in political circles and social media about the party not having a proper infrastructure to face the elections, the leaders are preparing for the election and want to cover the entire ground for the electoral battle with the belief that it was the prime opposition party in the State now.