A change of demeanor has occurred in the tone that came out of the BJP's headquarters in Uttar Pradesh this week on Vidhan Sabha Marg. The party's core group was sitting behind closed doors for over two hours Friday evening, working out the problem that has quietly troubled the party for the past four years since the last Lok Sabha polls in the state how to regain ground they seem to have given up in an election where they won 71 of 80 seats.

All Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath's two deputy chiefs Keshav Prasad Maurya and Brajesh Pathak, party president Pankaj Chaudhary and two of the party's top organisation hands from Delhi, B L Santhosh and Vinod Tawde, were present. The timing of Tawde's visit was his second such visit to Lucknow within a week, which in the BJP's world usually translates to "show us what you're doing, not just what you're reporting.

On the surface, the top-line takeaways from the meeting are all sorts of common sense: welfare delivery, outreach to women, and a sheriff's campaign of getting Gen Z voters engaged. But the context and the nature of the discussion suggest something more specific. The party is still taking stock of the Lok Sabha outcome in 2024 when it had suffered a whopping collapse from 62 seats in Uttar Pradesh to just 33, and the Samajwadi Party, which was tagged dead after years of decline, had surged from five to 37 seats and with Congress's six seats, gave the opposition INDIA bloc 43 of the state's 80 seats. It was the one most significant factor that made Narendra Modi settle for a single-party minority government and have to depend upon allies to form government for the third term. That was no ordinary setback for a party that had been counting on Uttar Pradesh as a bastion of their success since 2014.

This week's meeting is special because of the detail of the answer. Party sources say the BJP has moved from booth to booth in the many polling stations it comfortably won in the 2022 assembly election, but its performance dipped on the same polling stations during the 2024 Lok Sabha poll. That is not a broad strategic shift, it's more like forensic accounting the kind of exercise that might occur after a company has lost market share in what it thought were safe areas. The party's own evaluation based on discussions with people familiar with the situation is that the erosion was limited to particular segments of society and demographics, and that the focus this time is not on uniform messaging of Hindutva, but on welfare delivery and youth outreach, where the disconnect between what is promised and what is perceived is the most apparent to the voters.

This sense of urgency is heightened by the economic context. The state's GSDP has expanded by about 11 per cent, to ₹30.25 lakh crore, from an estimated ₹13.3 lakh crore in 2016-17 and Uttar Pradesh has become the second largest state by economic size in the country, based on data from the state's own first-ever Economic Survey tabled earlier this year. The per capita income has increased by almost double in the same time and is now at approximately ₹1.1 lakh.

The state government points to an unemployment rate which has dropped dramatically since previous decades and those are real gains. But independent economists reporting on the same figures note that attaining the government's self-proclaimed goal of a trillion dollar economy by 2029 will necessitate continued annual growth rates of more than 20 percent, more than double what the state has recorded in its best years. Uttar Pradesh's per capita income is still lower than the national average and although many jobs generated by self-employment schemes and MSME credit lines are recognised, even by government quarters, to be low paying and precarious. The disconnect between macro headline numbers and the daily lived experience is the field in which young voters, specifically those who voted for the first time between 18-23 years old, make impressions that do not always align with official growth numbers.

It is here that the comparison with other large democracies comes in handy. Whether it's in Brazil or Indonesia, or somewhere else in Europe, recent elections have shown that good aggregate growth figures don't necessarily pay off in loyalty from younger generations, who are more concerned with quality of jobs, cost of living and visible opportunity than with statistics. The BJP's own internal communication also seems to be an acceptance of the global trend that is happening in the country: the young voter is not just being reached through digital communication or social media it's being reached by action that is proving to have a tangible impact on his or her household in the form of welfare schemes that demonstrate growth.

Political theatre was not lacking at the meeting either. When asked about Akhilesh Yadav's earlier assertion that the Samajwadi Party would rule the state, Chaudhary shot a down-to-the-ground jibe at the SP chief, likening him to a folk personality, Mungeri Lal, who is known for his elaborate daydreams, which illustrates the serious approach of the ruling party to the opposition outfit that it had until 2024, largely discounted as a spent force. Now there are two campaigns on the horizon that will launch on the PM's birthday on September 17, with both focused on delivery, making it clearly visible to voters, well in advance of the 2027 election.

It's too early to tell if the granular booth efforts and youth message can counter the losses of 2024. The BJP in the state has not taken its Uttar Pradesh government for granted anymore and the defeat of the JD(U) in the meeting is the more significant story than the one in Lucknow.