New Delhi (PTI): The BJP office-bearers meeting on Friday witnessed heated exchange of words between party general secretary Vinay Katiyar and senior leader Jaswant Singh on the issue of leakage of Singh's controversial letter to the media.

Mr. Katiyar asked Mr. Jaswant how the letter he tried to circulate during the party's last Core Group meeting was leaked to the media.

The letter, which demanded that there should be a link between performance and rewards among other issues, was withdrawn by Jaswant at the behest of senior party leader L K Advani.

"Jaswant shot back at Katiyar and said nobody had questioned his credibility in the last 44 years of his political career," a party leader present in the meeting told PTI.

Mr. Jaswant added that he was not answerable to anybody.

No sooner had this heated exchange subsided, Vice-president Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi and Mohammad Shahnawaz expressed their ire over the party maintaining silence over the hate-speeches of party leader Varun Gandhi in Pilibhit.

Mr. Naqvi, who lost from Rampur constituency in the Lok Sabha polls, was visibly angry and even objected to party president Rajnath Singh visiting Mr. Varun in jail.

Mr. Naqvi and Mr. Shahnawaz told party leaders in the meeting that "Rahul Gandhi had not won the elections for the Congress but Varun had lost the polls for the BJP".

The two said that though they were loyal to the BJP, the party should also "take all sections of the organisation along".

They also reportedly claimed that they had problems in facing the voters in their Muslim-dominated constituencies.

Sources said the two complained that the silence of the party on the issue was read as a tacit support to Varun's hate-speech.

A section of the party feels that the BJP lost several seats, especially in Western Uttar Pradesh which has a sizable Muslim population, due to Varun's speech.

Mr. Naqvi is said to have told the meeting that the party had followed Deen Dayal Upadhaya's humanism and later Atal Bihari Vajpayee's values but it was not clear what brand of Hindutva was being pursued by BJP now.