For a political party that often turns to India's hoary past to guide its future, the Bharatiya Janata Party has found a new inspiration, that too from the United States of America.

The Washington Post reports that the election campaign of L K Advani, the BJP's prime ministerial candidate, is being fashioned after the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama [Images].

For months now, the Post reports, a core group of political strategists, computer specialists and management graduates have been poring over Obama's speeches and web site, his campus of change and, of course, the rhetoric of change, to nail down how Advani's campaign can be run to inspire India's untapped potential of young voters.

In a recent interview with Chennai-based The Hindu, Advani spoke about how he has never seen so much despair in people.

What is the secret of Advani's energy?

The BJP seeks to project Advani as the harbinger of change who will replace this despair with hope.

'About 100 million first-time voters will enter the election landscape next year. That is a staggering number of young people. And the Indian youth is impatient for change,' Sudheendra Kulkarni, former journalist and one of Advani's key strategists told the Post. 'We want to project the image of Advani around the idea of change the same way that Obama's message resonated with people's hunger for change.'

Concurs Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi, BJP member of Parliament former minister of state for information and broadcasting: 'Like the Obama brand, we need to create a buzz around Advani-ji.' Naqvi was in the US recently on a leadership programme at Yale University, from where he has brought back a book full of observations from America's presidential primaries.

The BJP has always been a tech-savvy party, but the coming election, the party believes, will see technology a more central role than ever before, and has lined up a cell phones and the Internet as major weapons in its political armoury.

Pratibha Patil on her father L K Advani

This, it hopes, it will also take it closer to the youth, who make up two-thirds of India's one billion-plus population.

India also has one of the world's fastest growing cell phone markets with 185 million subscribers, with a whopping 5.5 million added every month.

Work is also underway to create a web site like Obama's. His 'site successfully created communities of supporters and voters. It was used to call a meeting of friends and plan events,' Prodyut Bora, 33, head of the campaign's technology initiative, told the Post. 'We would like the Advani portal to enable millions of voters to connect with him and with each other. This would encourage people to become Advani's local campaigners.'

Bora's team has been hard at work, uploading vide clips from Advani's six decade-long political career on to Youtube.com. Plans are also afoot to target social networking sites like facebook.com and orkut.com that are frequented by youth.

The strategy team also hopes that Advani's memoirs, My country, My life, which was published in March, will play a similar role like Obama's The Audacity of Hope.

Why Advani wrote his memoirs

Of course, there are dissenters too at the idea of drawing parallels between Advani and Obama.

 'That particular campaign style worked for Obama because he is a young, fresh-faced, charming man who promises change. But Advani has too much baggage, both good and bad, attached to him,' Ramachandra Guha, a political historian with the New India Foundation, a Bangalore-based research group, told the Post. 'It strains one's credulity to imagine the austere, unsmiling Advani being rebranded like Obama.'

Plus, despite the talk of an online revolution, more than 75 per cent of India's population is offline, many of them mired in poverty and illiteracy. How will such a blitz touch them, is a question that hard to duck.

Bora conceded that 75 percent of the party's political networking will have to be offline. 'People ask me if we are adopting the Obama campaign strategy for Advani-ji. My answer is: 'Replication, no. Inspiration, yes.'," he told the Post.

The BJP kicked off its series of programmes in January that it says will instill a sense of honour and responsibility among first-time voters. For one, they will be given trendy wristbands that say, 'I am proud to be a first time voter'.

Advani's book shows how hawk turned soft

In its efforts to reach out to the young and restless, the BJP has found help from overseas as well. Abhishek Kumar, a software engineer from Houston, worked as a volunteer for Obama, organizing young Americans for the 'Nation for Change' rally in April, and working as a phone bank officer. A month ago he got in touch with Advani's campaign team with a proposal to bring in the young voters. Impressed, the BJP has invited him to India for two months, says the Post.

'I am not even an American citizen, and I cannot vote,' Kumar, 26, told the Post. 'But because of my work, I feel that the Obama campaign is my own campaign. That is the same feeling I want to bring among the Indian youth for the Advani campaign.'