Following The Father: The Parallel Rise Of Udhayanidhi Stalin

His grandfather ruled it five times. His father is ruling it now. And he will rule it in the future. The question is not if, but when he will become Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.

Born November 27, 1977, Udhayanidhi Stalin is the son of MK Stalin, the boy from Chennai's Marina Beach who led the DMK to a hat-trick of wins starting with the 2019 federal election and is expected to extend that dominance into a second decade with victory in the 2026 state poll.

His rise was mapped. He follows the path his father trod from the 1980s. A 'start at the bottom and work your way up' philosophy, beginning with stewardship of the youth wing of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, though of course the climb was made easier for the younger Stalin.

That was in part because Udhayanidhi arrived with something his father didn't have - a fan base built across a decade in the movies, first as a producer then as a star. Politics and cinema are the two larger-than-life pillars of the Tamil identity and Udhayanidhi Stalin is fluent in both.

The debut came in 2019.

As his father did 52 years ago, Udhayanidhi Stalin cut his political teeth on the ground, working beside the party's rank and file to campaign for an election, this time the Lok Sabha poll.

It was a difficult year.

Udhayanidhi's grandfather M Karunanidhi - the party's stalwart, the living link to the DMK's ideological roots - had died a year earlier. And his father, MK Stalin, had taken charge of a party reeling from a decade of playing second fiddle to J Jayalalithaa and the AIADMK.

The 2019 Lok Sabha election was MK Stalin's first big test.

And his son delivered a critical bloc of votes from Tamil Nadu's young voters; under Udhayanidhi the DMK's youth wing established a strong social media and digital footprint, and created content that won over the masses of men and women in the 18-29 age group, particularly on emotive issues like language and the NEET, or National Eligibility cum Entrance Test.

Social media wasn't new in 2019, but it was under-leveraged in Tamil Nadu politics. The AIADMK's ground-level, door-to-door model struggled to respond to the speed and scale of a digital campaign that, eventually, branded the BJP "anti-Tamil" and the AIADMK by extension.

The result was overwhelming; a 16.3 per cent vote share increase for the DMK's alliance. The DMK and its smaller Tamil allies won 30 seats they contested, the Congress eight of its nine.

Two years later, in the 2021 Assembly election, the pattern held - the DMK won 133 of the 188 seats it contested and its alliance 159 of the state's 234. Here was confirmation that Udhayanidhi Stalin, like his father, had passed his first two electoral exams with flying colours.

Perhaps as important, it also underlined his political versatility. 2019 was about social media, 2021 focused on people-to-people interactions. The younger Stalin hit the campaign trail, travelling through all 234 constituencies in an echo of his father's 2016 and 2017 programmes.

2019 put him on people's mobile phone screens. 2021 put him in their houses.

And in the Tamil Nadu Assembly.

Udhayanidhi Stalin made his electoral debut that year, contesting from the recently-created Chepauk-Thiruvallikeni constituency. Carved out in 2011, it quickly became a DMK bastion.

And the younger Stalin put that advantage to good use; he swept nearly 69 per cent of the ballots and finished over 70,000 votes ahead of his rival, the PMK's Kassali. It was telling that neither the BJP nor the AIADMK bothered contesting from that seat that year.

From there the rise was swift. In 2022 he became a cabinet member - the Minister for Youth Welfare and Sports Development. The post played to his strengths - urban, sporty, and aimed at younger voters. The DMK called it a 'generational shift within its leadership structure'.

In 2024 he was promoted again, this time as Tamil Nadu's Deputy Chief Minister.

Now, that post did not exist before 2009. Before MK Stalin was sworn in. Then it signalled that the boy named for a Russian dictator would become a Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu.

Udhayanidhi's 2024 elevation, then, confirmed the buzz - he was no longer simply the son of the Chief Minister or the grandson of the DMK patriarch, but a central figure for the party's future.