Chandan Basu met Mahajan at Gandhinagar during the BJP's national executive committee meeting. The West Bengal chief minister's son is said to be a longtime friend of Mahajan's son. Mahajan, however, described it as a courtesy call.

West Bengal BJP general secretary, Rahul Sinha, recently claimed that the party had sent a report to the Vajpayee Government on Chandan Basu's property and his financial `deals'. He, however, refused to divulge the contents of the letter. ``We've been asked by the party high command not todisclose the content,'' he added. State BJP leaders were emphatic that the Vajpayee Government would do nothing to ``shield Chandan Basu against any inquiries''. They, however, had no idea whether the government was making any such inquiry at present.

Meanwhile, the BJP's central observer, Kailashpati Mishra, who's been credited with having brought life into a political alliance that almost reached the deadend said he will meet Mamata Banerjee again and sort out whatever little is left of the earlier misunderstanding. Mishra was replying to a volley questions on the issue here today. He also ruled out any major hurdle in the path of `a total adjustment between the partners' who fought both the LF and the Congress in just the concluded Lok Sabha Elections.

Saying that there was progress in the talks, unlike some of the Trinamool Congress leaders, who still feel the BJP ``is going ahead with its agenda of ignoring the basic tenets of a political pact,'' Mishra said ``it was achieved because both shared acommon goal of putting an end to the two-decade of CPI(M)-led Left Front misrule.''

Incidentally, Mishra's mediation, which was widely believed to have been carried out under the direction from LK Advani, to put an end to squabbles between the alliance partners, according sources, angered a section of state BJP.

The grape-vine has it that the discontent consider that a patch-up was reached after `his abject surrender to the Trinamool Congress which lowered the prestige of the party.' Tapan Sikdar, who has also been conspicuously keeping himself away from the major press briefings after the resumption of talks between the partners, only buttressed this view.