Rajinikanth Visits Stalin: 'With You in Hard Times Too'

Rajinikanth turned up at MK Stalin’s residence on Wednesday morning, two days after the DMK’s electoral defeat and Stalin’s own personal loss in Kolathur, and told the former chief minister he would stand by him through the harder side of the cycle as well. “I will be with you not only in moments of victory but also in difficult times,” Rajinikanth said, in a line picked up first by Sun News and then circulated through the afternoon as photos from inside the meeting began appearing on social media.

The frame Sun News led with was tight and unposed: Rajinikanth in plain white seated on a sofa, Stalin in his usual white half-sleeve shirt across a small marble-topped table, two cups of water between them, family photos on the side ledge (Stalin’s wife Durga in one, a photo of Udhayanidhi with another family member in the next). There is no aide visible in the frame and no aide visible in the second image either, which suggests the visit was deliberately staged as a personal call rather than a political one.

The timing is what makes the picture worth reading carefully. Rajinikanth had already posted a public note congratulating Vijay on TVK’s win on Monday evening, addressing him as the president of “the victorious Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam” and offering wishes to him and his party. That post is still pinned. The Stalin visit, two days later, doesn’t unsay any of it. What it does is draw a line under the public-cordiality side of the Vijay note, and reach for a longer-running relationship that has nothing to do with the new arithmetic in the assembly.

That longer relationship is on the record. In 1995, when Rajinikanth was poised to enter politics, he stepped back and instead publicly backed the DMK alliance, the call most often credited with shaping the 1996 verdict. He repeated the support in the 1998 general elections. The political party he announced in 2020 wound down in 2021 on health grounds before it ever contested a poll, and in the four years since, his public posture toward Stalin has been one of continuous endorsement; in the run-up to this election cycle, he had called Stalin “an emerging star in Indian politics, all set for 2026.” That last endorsement aged unevenly. The visit on Wednesday is the form he has chosen to follow it up with.

For Stalin, the meeting falls into a difficult window. His son and former deputy chief minister Udhayanidhi Stalin is now the most plausible leader of the opposition in the next assembly, with his Chepauk seat the only senior DMK retention near the top of the ticket. Stalin himself, having lost Kolathur to TVK’s V S Babu by a margin of around 8,700 votes, no longer holds an assembly seat for the first time since 2011. His resignation as chief minister was accepted on Tuesday morning. He visited Kolathur the same afternoon to thank constituents.

Vijay, meanwhile, is set to take the chief minister’s oath at Nehru Indoor Stadium on Thursday. TVK’s 108 seats put the party 11 short of the 119-mark for a working majority; the Indian National Congress’s 5 seats, with which TVK is now in alliance talks, takes the count to within touching distance, and Vijay has formally requested two weeks from the governor to demonstrate the floor strength. The actual government-formation timeline through the rest of this week sits inside the Governor question Vishal flagged on Monday, the same constitutional pinch-point that has shadowed every recent transition where the Raj Bhavan and the would-be CM have not been on speaking terms.

Rajinikanth’s own film calendar runs in parallel. He wrapped Jailer 2 last week, with Nelson directing and Ramya Krishnan, Mirnaa, Mithun Chakraborty, Vijay Sethupathi, Suraj Venjaramoodu and a returning Mohanlal cameo on the call sheet. KH x RK with Kamal Haasan, also Nelson, sits next on the slate, with Cibi Chakravarthy’s Rajinikanth film, produced by Kamal Haasan’s banner, after that. None of which was the conversation in the room on Wednesday morning. The room held one line that will keep working long after the photo stops trending: I will be with you in difficult times too.