Chennai, May 5 -- When Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam, TVK, won 107 seats in Tamil Nadu on Monday, defeating the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam's 74 seats and pushing the AIADMK-led combine to third with 53 seats, it did so in the manner its leader had designed: as a generational verdict against 40 years of Dravidian duopoly, won on a campaign calibrated to the voters the old parties had stopped speaking to.

The architecture of that campaign rested on five decisions.

The first was positioning. Vijay drew a deliberate distinction between his two opponents - declaring the BJP an "ideological opponent" and the DMK a "political opponent known for its corruption and family politics." The framing allowed him to occupy the space neither party could credi...