INSIDE WAR ROOM: THE SILENT OPERATORS WHO SCRIPTED TVK’S WINNING FORMULA

Here’s how a young campaign team tapped into constituency-wise anti-incumbency against Dravidian majors

- PRABHAKAR TAMILARASU

THE first thing that greets you when you walk into the Voice of Commons office is a quote on the wall: “If you do not interfere in politics, politics will eventually interfere in your life.”

Step further in and a red sofa sits against a sprawling black-and-white mural of Periyar, Ambedkar and Gandhi, alongside Martin Luther King Jr, Che Guevara, Abraham Lincoln, Bhagat Singh, Karl Marx, and other reformers and revolutionaries. Opposite the sofa, hangs a framed copy of the Preamble.

Walk past that, and you enter the main floor with rows of workstations in yellow and maroon, the colours of TVK, stretching across a large open office. On the far wall, a life-size cutout of Vijay, arms wide open, smiles over the room. In the workspace, mobile phones rang incessantly, some people glued to screens, others pacing and talking for hours. For anyone who walked in unannounced, it could easily have looked like a social media shop of a political outfit, where voters are wooed by Instagram reels and stories.

But, the ‘war room’ of Voice of Commons (VoC), that worked for Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam and headed by Aadhav Arjuna, was doing far more. At the core of it was chief strategist Kapil Sahu, working with a team of around 40 people — field researchers and on-ground analysts — supported by a wider network of ghostwriters and social media strategists. The team was young, mostly filled with Gen Z recruits, fresh out of college with no prior political experience.