India’s Tamil Nadu state elects first Christian chief minister, actor-turned-politician C. Joseph Vijay
C. Joseph Vijay, a 51-year-old film star-turned-politician, was sworn in as chief minister of Tamil Nadu on Sunday, becoming the first Christian to hold the office in the second-most-populous southern state in India, a country where Christians are persecuted and account for less than 3% of the population.
Vijay’s recently formed party, Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, which is also called Tamil Victory Party or TVK, won 108 of the 234 seats in the state assembly, with post-election support from left-of-center and communist parties and the Indian Union Muslim League.
The election result upended nearly six decades of alternating power between the state’s two dominant parties, the DMK and the AIADMK.
Vijay, popularly known as “Thalapathy,” meaning commander, was born to film director S.A. Chandrasekhar and singer Shoba Chandrasekhar, and was baptized and raised Catholic, according to UCA News.
Fr. Charles Anthonyswamy, editor of The New Leader, a Catholic publication of the Archdiocese of Madras-Mylapore, called the election results “genuinely historic,” but expressed caution.
“His Catholic heritage does not automatically translate into a pro-Christian administration, and conflating the two would be premature," Anthonyswamy told UCA News.
He said the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, or BJP, targeted Vijay’s religious identity during the campaign, which may have consolidated votes among religious minorities.
In a report released in March, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom urged the State Department to designate India as a “country of particular concern,” citing systematic and ongoing violations of religious freedom.
From 2021 onward, each successive year has set a new record for reported violence against Christians in India, according to data compiled by the United Christian Forum, an Indian advocacy group. Reported incidents numbered 486 in 2021, 601 in 2022, 734 in 2023 and 834 in 2024. The figure rose to almost 900 in 2025.
Vijay did not campaign on religious identity. His platform was welfare-oriented, and he reportedly visited places of worship of multiple faiths during the campaign.
John Dayal, a senior journalist and spokesperson for the All India Catholic Union, an advocacy group for Catholics in India, noted that Vijay was not the first Catholic chief minister in the country, pointing to precedents in India’s northeastern states.
“While we celebrate his identity, we should also hope he fulfills his promises and meets public expectations,” Dayal was quoted as saying by UCA News.
Vijay’s party has backed extending “Scheduled Caste” status to Dalit Christians who have converted from Hinduism. Scheduled Caste status confers access to government affirmative action benefits, including reserved seats in public employment and higher education, and is reserved for communities officially recognized as having faced discrimination under India’s caste hierarchy. Currently, Indian law recognizes only Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists born into lower castes as eligible.
TVK was launched in 2024. Vijay’s mass appeal during the campaign drew comparisons with M.G. Ramachandran, the actor-politician who served as Tamil Nadu’s chief minister from 1977 until his death in 1987. In his first major political speech in October 2024, Vijay cited the social reformer Periyar E.V. Ramasamy as his ideological guide and invoked Tamil Nadu’s founding Chief Minister C.N. Annadurai, independence-era Congress leader K. Kamaraj, and the Indian Constitution’s principal drafter B.R. Ambedkar, according to The Free Press Journal.
Vijay openly embraced his Christian identity while advocating secular values, a term understood in India as equal treatment of all religions by the state rather than opposition to religion. His film “Jana Nayagan,” meaning “people’s leader,” released before the election, was widely seen as reinforcing his political positioning.
