A disgruntled employee. An all-powerful boss. And sweet revenge.
All the elements of (another) blockbuster from the 2026 Tamil Nadu election played out Monday in TVK leader VS Babu handing Chief Minister MK Stalin a shock defeat in his Kolathur bastion.
Babu polled 9,192 votes more the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam boss.
For context, the Kolathur seat was created after a delimitation exercise before the 2011 election. Stalin – then the Deputy Chief Minister – edged the AIADMK’s Saidai Duraisamy that year by 2,734 votes. In 2016 and 2021 the margins were much more dominant; he won by 37,730 and 70,384, respectively, over the AIADMK’s JCD Prabhakar and Aadi Rajaram.
It was the textbook definition of a political bastion.
But on Monday that narrative flipped.
Tamil Nadu Election Results | MK Stalin Loses Kolathur Stronghold To TVK’s VS Babu
Rewind to the 2011 poll.
The DMK chose to shift Stalin from the Thousands Lights constituency – a seat he won in four of the six previous elections – to the newly-created Kolathur. Stalin duly won.
But the northern Chennai seat threw up a closer contest than the DMK’s powers-that-be likely wanted for the man being groomed as the next-generation party boss. And Babu – the man who engineered Stalin’s campaign – was held responsible.
The overall district in-charge for north Chennai till 2011, he was given an additional responsibility – to oversee MK Stalin’s campaign. The expectation was high, which was perhaps puzzling as few of Stalin’s previous wins had been one-sided.
The now-DMK chief has only won by 10,000 votes or more five times. Before 2011 that was in the 1996 election when he retained the Thousand Lights seat by a massive 44,877 ballots. Nevertheless, the slim margin was the end of VS Babu’s job.
The DMK shunted him out and replaced him with PK Shekhar Babu as the party’s north Chennai district chief.
In June 2016 VS Babu jumped to the AIADMK.
And in February 2026 he joined the TVK, in hindsight an astute hire who has done exactly what he was brought in to do – to complete a humiliating Monday for the DMK and MK Stalin.