When Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay walked out of the Assembly on May 13 having won the floor test with 144 votes, the headlines celebrated his victory. And it was a victory worth celebrating. But if you were watching closely, the most significant thing that happened in that chamber had nothing to do with Vijay.
It happened when SP Velumani stood up to speak in support of the confidence motion and the AIADMK benches erupted in protests. That moment, loud and chaotic and impossible to ignore, was the sound of a 47-year-old party cracking open on the floor of the Tamil Nadu Assembly.
A party that predicted 210 seats, won 47
In December 2025, AIADMK General Secretary Edappadi K Palaniswami stood before his party’s General Council and declared the AIADMK-led alliance would win 210 of Tamil Nadu’s 234 assembly seats. He had done the vote-share mathematics, arrived at a combined 41.33%, and confidently told his party workers that power was coming back to them.
When the results came in on May 4, the AIADMK had won 47 seats. Not 210. Not even close. They lost their position as principal opposition to DMK, which won 59 seats. TVK, Vijay’s brand new party contesting its very first election, won 108 seats — more than double the AIADMK’s count. For a party carrying the legacies of MG Ramachandran and J Jayalalithaa, this was a humiliation. And in politics, humiliation has consequences.
EPS said 47. Only 22 listened.
In the days leading up to the floor test, Palaniswami was unambiguous. All 47 AIADMK MLAs would vote against the TVK government. The party issued a formal whip, and a Rajya Sabha MP publicly warned that defiance would invite disqualification under the Tenth Schedule.
Meanwhile, Vijay had quietly visited senior AIADMK leader CV Shanmugam, and was received warmly by both Shanmugam and SP Velumani. Shanmugam’s faction had already declared they were severing ties with the NDA alliance and submitted a letter to the pro-tem Speaker demanding Velumani be recognised as leader of the AIADMK legislative party a direct challenge to EPS’s authority.
When the votes were counted, 25 of the 47 AIADMK MLAs voted in support of Vijay’s confidence motion. Only 22 voted with EPS. Palaniswami had promised 47 against. He got 22.
What velumani said
The most telling moment came from Velumani’s words on the assembly floor amid protests from his own colleagues. “The people’s verdict is God’s verdict,” he said — a pointed line suggesting that defying the government the electorate had chosen was an act of arrogance. He also denied his faction was seeking any ministerial position. Whether that holds in the months ahead is another question, but on this day the message was clear.
The anti-defection trap
India’s anti-defection law requires at least two-thirds of a legislature party in this case 32 of 47 MLAs to formally merge with another party to be protected from disqualification. The Velumani-Shanmugam faction has only 25, leaving them seven short. EPS has indicated disqualification notices are coming, which could trigger by-elections across multiple constituencies and reshape the assembly’s arithmetic entirely.
A party with a history of breaking
This is not the AIADMK’s first public split. After Jayalalithaa’s death in 2016, the party fractured between the Panneerselvam and Palaniswami factions before merging. In July 2022, four leaders O Panneerselvam, PH Manoj Pandian, R Vaithilingam, and JCD Prabhakar were expelled at a General Council meeting on July 11. The party has survived crises before, but always from a position of relative strength. Today it enters this battle in third place, having just suffered its worst electoral performance in decades.
Vijay won the floor test. That much is settled. But Tamil Nadu politics has always been defined by DMK and AIADMK passing power back and forth across decades. That duopoly has now been broken by a third force. The question that remains is whether the AIADMK can find its way back as a unified opposition or whether May 13, 2026 turns out to be the beginning of its long, slow unravelling.
SP Velumani gave his answer on the assembly floor. Edappadi K Palaniswami may not see it that way. But right now, the people’s verdict is all that counts.
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