On the stage in Chennai where C Joseph Vijay took oath as Tamil Nadu Chief Minister on Saturday, one of the new ministers who drew attention was Aadhav Arjuna, the ambitious political operator who had travelled through the DMK, the VCK, and finally the TVK, before landing at the centre of the state’s new ruling arrangement.
Watching from the audience was his father-in-law, and lottery baron, Santiago Martin, mother-in-law and AIADMK MLA Leema Rose Martin, and wife Daisy. Elsewhere in the political map sat another layer of the same family: Arjuna’s brother-in-law Jose Charles Martin, founder of BJP ally Latchiya Jananayaga Katchi (LJK) and a newly elected legislator in Puducherry and likely, a minister soon.
Few business families in South India today appear as politically diversified as the Martins. In Tamil Nadu and Puducherry’s rapidly shifting post-election landscape, members of the family are now spread across rival parties, rival alliances and, potentially, rival governments, a distribution that increasingly resembles a carefully hedged political portfolio.
At the centre of Tamil Nadu’s new power structure is Arjuna, who emerged over the past year as one of the TVK’s most visible organisers and strategists. Once a close aide within the DMK ecosystem and a close associate of M K Stalin’s son-in-law Sabareesan, and later assuming a senior post in Thol Thirumavalavan’s VCK, Arjuna joined Vijay after a bitter fallout with Thirumavalavan. Inside the TVK, he became central to campaign management, alliance outreach, and booth-level operations.
A quick rise
Arjuna’s rise has been unusually fast, even by Tamil Nadu standards. A former gym trainer who married into the Martin family, he gradually moved through business and political networks before positioning himself inside one of the state’s most disruptive political movements.
But while Arjuna now occupies office in a Vijay-led government, his extended family remains politically distributed elsewhere. Leema Rose Martin only recently entered the AIADMK after quitting the Indhiya Jananayaga Katchi (IJK), where she spent 14 years. During the power-sharing negotiations last week, she unexpectedly became a central public figure after openly acknowledging talks between the TVK and the AIADMK over possible government formation.
Those talks, initiated partly through Arjuna’s channels, briefly fuelled speculation that sections of the AIADMK could eventually support Vijay. Even now, political circles continue to discuss the possibility of a split in the AIADMK, maybe within a week, Leema could become one of the legislators drifting closer toward the TVK.
Meanwhile, in neighbouring Puducherry, Jose Charles Martin has taken a sharply different route. The 37-year-old businessman founded the LJK and aligned it with the BJP-backed NDA alliance in Puducherry, where he won his first Assembly election. Jose Charles speaks more like a corporate strategist than a politician. During the campaigns, he spoke openly to The Indian Express about transforming Puducherry into “Singapore, Dubai and Hong Kong,” attracting foreign investment, and using business-style management to govern.
“Our turnover is around Rs 24,000 crore,” he said in the interview, referring to the broader family business network. “When we contribute so much to society, why can’t we transform things?”
The Martin empire
The Martin family’s political reach cannot be separated from its business empire. Led by Santiago Martin through Future Gaming and Hotel Services, the family built one of India’s largest lottery operations, with Enforcement Directorate (ED) filings previously estimating lottery-related turnover in the tens of thousands of crores. The company also emerged as the single-largest purchaser of electoral bonds in India, buying bonds worth about Rs 1,368 crore between 2019 and 2024.
That financial scale has long translated into political access across parties. For years, Santiago Martin maintained relationships cutting across ideological lines, even while facing investigations and attacks from rivals. In Kerala, former CM V S Achuthanandan was the only leader who had targeted him as a symbol of the nexus between wealth and political influence. Yet the Martin network continued expanding. Now, instead of proximity to one party alone, the family increasingly appears embedded across multiple centres of power simultaneously.
Unease within family?
The arrangement has inevitably produced friction within the family too. Jose Charles Martin has publicly criticised Arjuna in unusually blunt language, accusing him of seeking power aggressively and trying to dominate family affairs. “He is desperate for power,” he told Express in the interview. “We have seen money, we have seen power. But his approach is different.”
On Sunday, hours after Vijay’s swearing-in, Jose Charles again targeted his brother-in-law, publicly warning Chief Minister Vijay that he should remain cautious about corruption in his own circle. “Vijay should be watchful and not let Arjuna loot money or take commissions from the government,” he said.
The remark revealed both the family tensions and the unusual nature of the Martin family’s political reach: one relative attacking another even while occupying different ruling formations. If one door closes, another remains open.
