Sasikala Launches Party, Targets EPS in Renewed AIADMK Power Struggle

In Tamil Nadu politics, inheritances are rarely settled quietly. Nearly a decade after the death of J Jayalalithaa, the question of who owns her political legacy still refuses to close. Into that unsettled space has stepped VK Sasikala, announcing the launch of a new party as the state begins to look toward the 2026 Assembly election. The All India Puratchi Thalaivar Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam is a move shaped by grievance, memory and unfinished rivalries, directed most clearly at the man who now runs the party Jayalalithaa once commanded: Edappadi K Palaniswami.

Sasikala’s political career has always been inseparable from Jayalalithaa’s shadow. For decades she was the private confidante inside the fortress of Poes Garden, the small circle of power around Jayalalithaa that controlled the inner workings of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam. When Jayalalithaa died in December 2016, that arrangement briefly turned into formal authority. Sasikala was appointed interim general secretary of the party and, in February 2017, the AIADMK’s legislators elected her leader, positioning her to become chief minister.

The ascent lasted barely days. The Supreme Court restored her conviction in the m disproportionate assets case that had long trailed Jayalalithaa and her inner circle. Sasikala surrendered and went to prison in Bengaluru. The conviction also barred her from contesting elections until January 2027. Even now, as she launches a new political organisation, she cannot herself stand on the ballot.

Her political strategy since her release in 2021 has therefore taken a familiar form in Tamil Nadu: leadership without candidature. Jayalalithaa herself once ran the state’s politics while legally barred from contesting elections. Sasikala appears to believe that authority in the AIADMK universe has always flowed less from formal office than from proximity to the leader and control over the organisation built around that leader’s memory.

That belief has collided with the man who consolidated power while she was absent. Palaniswami’s rise inside the AIADMK was not inevitable. In early 2017 he emerged as a compromise figure after factional manoeuvres inside the party, becoming chief minister just as Sasikala began her prison sentence. Over the following years he moved steadily to secure the party machinery, expelling both Sasikala and her nephew TTV Dhinakaran from the organisation and consolidating his authority over the AIADMK structure. In 2023 the Madras High Court upheld Sasikala’s removal from the AIADMK leadership framework. By then Palaniswami had already reshaped the party around himself, presenting the AIADMK as the principal opposition to the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government led by MK Stalin.

Sasikala’s new party is an attempt to reopen an old dispute: who has the stronger claim to Jayalalithaa’s political inheritance. Tamil Nadu has already seen one version of that dispute play out through her nephew. After being expelled from the AIADMK, Dhinakaran launched the Amma Makkal Munnetra Kazhagam in 2018. For a brief moment he appeared capable of unsettling the Dravidian balance. In the December 2017 RK Nagar by-election—the constituency Jayalalithaa had represented—he won as an independent with 89,013 votes, defeating the AIADMK candidate by more than 40,000 votes in a contest that carried enormous symbolic weight.

Yet the later trajectory of the AMMK suggested the limits of such insurgencies. In the 2019 Lok Sabha election the party polled around 5.4 percent of the vote in Tamil Nadu and won no seats. In the 2021 Assembly election it contested 165 constituencies but secured only about 2.3 percent of the statewide vote and failed to win a single seat. The performance demonstrated that splinter groups could damage the AIADMK’s margins in certain regions, particularly in parts of southern Tamil Nadu, without replacing the party as a statewide force.

Sasikala’s re-entry unfolds against that history. She cannot contest the coming election herself. Nor does she possess a ready-made organisation comparable to the AIADMK’s extensive cadre network. What she does possess is the lingering authority of association: the decades spent beside Jayalalithaa, the loyalty of fragments of the old AIADMK base and the ability to keep alive a story of betrayal by those who rose during her imprisonment.

Whether that is enough to alter the state’s electoral math is another matter. In the 2021 Assembly election the DMK won 133 seats on its own and 159 with allies in the 234-member Assembly, returning to power after ten years. The AIADMK secured 66 seats and remained the principal opposition party. The political map that emerged from that election still resembles the familiar Dravidian binary, but the internal cohesion that once defined both major parties has weakened since the deaths of Jayalalithaa and M Karunanidhi.

Sasikala is not likely to recreate the authority Jayalalithaa once wielded over the AIADMK. But her return ensures that the AIADMK must again confront the unresolved question of succession that has hovered over the party since 2016.