The number the BJP is quietly chasing in Uttar Pradesh is 18,900, the booths it won across the state in the 2022 assembly elections and then lost in the 2024
Lok Sabha polls, most of them in rural areas. The drive to win them back is a statewide reset, and the party is launching it where its campaigns always seem to begin: western UP. BJP national president Nitin Nabin travels to Meerut and Saharanpur on September 21 and 22, putting one of the state's most decisive belts - 71 assembly seats - at the front of the party's election machinery well ahead of the next assembly polls. The two-day visit is built around organisational meetings with sitting and former district presidents, booth presidents, MLAs and MPs, and the cadres who man the party's shakti kendras. National general secretary (organisation) BL Santhosh is expected to follow with a wider tour of the state, extending the exercise beyond the western belt. Saharanpur is no incidental stop. It holds a fixed place in the BJP's electoral choreography: the party formally launched its campaigns from the district for both the 2017 and 2022 assembly elections, and in 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi began the Lok Sabha campaign from there. Returning to Saharanpur is, in effect, the BJP signalling that the next contest has begun. Caste complicates the arithmetic of western UP. The Jat vote remains the bloc the BJP has never fully folded in - which is where its alliance with the Rashtriya Lok Dal (RLD) does the heavy lifting in the region. The scale of the party's slippage is written into the Election Commission's numbers. In 2019 the BJP won 62 of Uttar Pradesh's 80 Lok Sabha seats; in 2024 it fell to 33, while the Samajwadi Party surged to 37 and the Congress to six - handing the INDIA bloc 43 seats in a state that had long been its most reliable stronghold. The reversal was starker still against the BJP's assembly record - 312 of 403 seats in 2017 and 255 in 2022 - a measure of how much ground had shifted beneath the party at the booth level in barely two years. That is what these meetings are really about. To recover the ground lost across the state between 2022 and 2024, the party's leaders have stepped out of the big drawing-room meetings and down to the shakti kendras, the booth-cluster units where elections in UP are actually won or lost. Nabin's western UP swing is the sharpest sign yet that the recovery operation starts at the smallest unit of the vote, and that it starts in the west.
