Sources said at an hour-long meeting with the President on May 8, Vajpayee was at pains to explain that he had been wrongly quoted by Panchajanya, a weekly Hindi mouthpiece of the RSS. The magazine had quoted him as saying that the President directed the government to seek a trust-vote acting under pressure from the Opposition.

Vajpayee is understood to have told the President that he had not given any formal interview to the weekly and had only met the magazine's representative, a senior RSS functionary. And he had only said that the President was under tremendous pressure from the Opposition, not that he had acted under the pressure. Vajpayee also reportedly explained his difficulty in denying the interview.

Ever since he returned the Cabinet's recommendations on the imposition of President's rule in Bihar lastyear, Narayanan has been facing flak from the BJP on one issue or the other. The attacks became sharper during the recent political crisis when it was made out that Narayanan had asked the Vajpayee government to seek a trust vote even as Rashtrapati Bhavan officials denied any such ``instructions.''

After the President recommended the dissolution of the House, Pramod Mahajan, during the press briefing released a copy of the Cabinet decision saying that the dissolution had been done at the behest of the President.