The crisis in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) deepened Thursday with hardliners taking a tough stance over L.K. Advani's controversial remarks in Pakistan even as a meeting of top leaders was postponed by a day.

A joint meeting of the BJP parliamentary board and central office bearers was first scheduled for the morning, then evening and then postponed till Friday with hardliners saying they would not dilute their ideology for Advani.

The meeting was deferred to buy some more time to find a solution to the crisis, sources said.

A section of the BJP leadership had, after long hours of backroom meetings, prepared a new resolution praising Advani's week-long visit to Pakistan as a "diplomatic and political success".

It was being hoped that Advani could be made to reconsider his decision to resign as party president with the new statement.

However, hardliners in the BJP and its ideologue Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) were believed to have expressed objections to any dilution in their stance.

RSS leaders reportedly conveyed their stand in "strong words" to the BJP leaders, stressing that they could never accept Advani's remarks appreciating Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah as secular or that the partition of the Indian subcontinent was an "unalterable reality of history".

Sources said it was this statement rather than his remarks on Jinnah that had irked the RSS and its affiliates.

Denying reports that the RSS would intervene in the matter of the resignation and the following developments as they were "internal affairs of the party", RSS spokesperson Ram Madhav nonetheless said that the organisation could not accept some views expressed by Advani.

"We can never accept his statement against Akhanda Bharat (united India)," Madhav told a television channel.

Murli Manohar Joshi, a known Advani baiter and one of the seniormost leaders of the BJP, also said the party could never accept Jinnah as secular.

"I do not consider Jinnah as a secular man. It's also clear that the BJP can never pass a resolution saying that Jinnah was secular," Joshi said.

A BJP resolution passed Wednesday had included fulsome praise of Advani but skirted references to his Pakistan trip. Advani was reportedly angry and disappointed with the party's noncommittal stance over it.

A section of the party is still hoping that Advani would yield to pressure and take back his resignation submitted Tuesday, the day after he returned from Pakistan.

While declining to accept repeated pleas to reconsider his resignation from senior leaders, including former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Advani is believed to have asked leaders to clarify the BJP's position on his comments on Jinnah.

BJP vice president M. Venkaiah Naidu, however, denied that Advani had made any such demands.

"Some (TV) channels have carried reports that Advani asked us to support his statements on Jinnah and some other media reports said that Advani had asked us to choose between him and the RSS. All these reports are false," Naidu told reporters here.

A stream of leaders, including Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi, Murli Manohar Joshi, BJP ally Janata Dal-United's leader Nitish Kumar apart from other senior BJP leaders, visited Advani Thursday at his residence.

While ally Telugu Desam Party said the controversy was an internal matter of the BJP, Kumar supported Advani's Karachi remarks. "What he said is right. The BJP leadership should convince others in what context he said so, " he told reporters.

Advani had during his Pakistan visit said Jinnah was a man who advocated a secular Pakistan and stood for Hindu-Muslim unity.

The comments had raised a furore with the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the RSS demanding he retract his complimentary references to a man who had been seen in India as the "villain" behind the partitioning of the subcontinent.