Party headquarters has prepared a series of motorcycle rides, bicycle drives, hackathons, cycling Marathons and innovations challenges designed to introduce a new generation of fresh, energetic faces to the ruling block in the run-up to a series of state elections that will take place until 2027. The core is a 1,500km motorcycle yatra in either direction from Prime Minister Narendra Modi's birthplace, Vadhnagar in Gujarat to Varanasi, his Lok Sabha hometown in Uttar Pradesh. It starts on the 17th September, the Prime Minister's birthday, when 20 teams of bikers, party workers and support vehicles race off from both ends at a rate of about 100 kilometres per day, each with four public events to drum up the government's welfare credentials at each stop. Next year, both Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh will have elections, and it's not coincidence.

The larger-scale push begins even sooner. On Teachers' Day, September 5, as the Shri Ram College of Commerce in Delhi celebrates its hundred years, PM Modi is expected to be in the city to interact directly with the students of SRC. That will be part of the BJP's annual Sewa Pakhwada or fortnight of service, from the second week of September, when the bike yatra will be followed by marathons and innovation contests that will take place across the campus where party workers will come into contact with first time and young voters. An internal exercise, which was referred to as a "Special-45" in the party, is now a special mission to crack this trickiest of the BJP to court voting blocks in more than a decade.

The dance itself isn't what's worth examining in this campaign, it's the context in which the dance is taking place. A leaked medical entrance examination paper earlier this year sparked student protests that spread to several cities and quickly evolved from a protest against a spoiled exam into something more like a referendum on the job market.

This summer's government figures of the labour force revealed youth unemployment for those aged 15 to 29 has risen to 16.2 per cent, more than a year after the series of monthly data started when it was at 13.8 per cent. The numbers of youth in the labour force have also declined, from 42.7 per cent in 2001-02 to 40.3 per cent in 2006-07. But the picture is even worse, according to independent research: The State of Working India 2026 report by Azim Premji University reveals that the unemployment rate among graduates aged 15-25 is nearly 40 per cent. It also found that less than one in ten male graduates get a permanent job within a year of completing their degree. Around 11 million of India's 63 million graduates (20-29 years) are not employed at all.

In comparison, India's often-talked-about demographic dividend seems to be a demographic liability that needs to be defused. With fewer than 367 million youth aged 15 to 29 in the country, a formidable third of the total working-age population, and excluding students, about 263 million of those youth (roughly 7/10) will be sucked up by the economy into productive work. Job creation in the informal sector, which has traditionally attracted most young people, fell to 7.45 million in 2025 from the previous year's 11 million, and wage growth in the sector almost halved.

The number of applications for the medical entrance exam alone jumped 50 per cent over seven years, a reasonable indicator of the number of young Indians who are pursuing a shrinking number of guaranteed well-paid avenues, through a handful of grueling competitive exams. Even members of the Prime Minister's own Economic Advisory Council have admitted that these days a college degree isn't a good bet for a decent living, as many first-time entrants to the job market are making wages that are too low for them to have to pay any income tax on their first pay cheque.

This has a historical reason why the BJP wouldn't want this to go down without any action. Nearly 187 million voters turned up for the first time in the 2014 and 2019 general elections, and both of the party's majorities were related to this. This equation seems less secure now. The pandemic has left the party strategists with a clear understanding of the protests of the summer, the trend of campus alliances with opposition parties and the polls after polls highlighting joblessness and inflation as the major issues for the youth and it is obvious that paying it back with welfare alone will not sustain that alliance for the upcoming 2027 elections in Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh.

The argument could be made that the direct contact, over time, of which these yatras and campus visits are examples, does affect public opinion, especially in a nation where retail politics spreads more quickly through a face-to-face meeting than a policy document. But there is a stiffer challenge lurking behind the agenda of bike rallies and hackathons: can a calendar of outreach, no matter how robust, replace the structural change that decades of governments from every political party have failed to bring, namely enough well-paying, secure jobs to match the scale of the nation's young population? A message can be carried by motorcycle a long way. They can't, alone, fill a labour market shortfall in the tens of millions.