Today's reactions showed this clear divide on how to tackle the fall-out of the Bihar goof-up. A visibly rattled party chief Kushabhau Thakre went on the offensive in Chennai saying that ``if Article 356 cannot be invoked in Bihar, then it is redundant.'' The President should have accepted the recommendation, he said. ``I do not know what compelled the President to ask the Cabinet to reconsider the decision.''

In Patna, leader of the Opposition Sushil Mody went a step further. ``The President might have been swayed by the attitude of the allies and also the pressure of the Congress,'' he said. ``It is really unfortunate that the President did not apply his mind tothe facts provided to him and succumbed to Congress pressure.''

When told that there were many partners in the coalition who wanted Article 356 to be scrapped, he said: ``We (the BJP) are not of that view.'' Asked how the BJP proposed to tackle the fallout, Thakre said: ``We have to fight it. After all, in a democracy, people are sovereign and people will win. That is the final solution.'' When pressed for specifics, he said: ``I am not the Government.''

Asked if the Bihar developments would make it more difficult for AIADMK general secretary J. Jayalalitha to demand the dismissal of the DMK Government here, he said, ``I cannot say anything on her behalf. We all know how difficult it is to impose President's Rule now.''

On whether the BJP would ``join hands'' with senior Janata Dal leader Ram Vilas Paswan, Thakre said: ``Our doors are open to anybody who accepts the BJP's policies and programmes.'' Thakre also met Jayalalitha at her Poes Garden residence and said they discussed the ``general politics ofthe country.''

In Patna, state BJP chief Nand Kishore Yadav and Mody said that the President should come to Bihar to get ``a first-hand impression.'' Other leaders, however, claim that the state unit of the party did not present a convincing case.

As for the allies in the government, there is growing unease on what they call the complete lack of coordination. Maintaining that the allies had not been consulted by the BJP-led Government on the Bihar issue, Shiromani Akali Dal general secretary Prem Singh Chandumajra felt that the entire affair could have been handled in a better way if the issue had been discussed threadbare in a coordination committee meeting.

He said that the Vajpayee Government had reneged on its promise to hold coordination committee meetings at regular intervals to iron out differences. ``There is urgent need to hold more such meetings,'' he told The Indian Express in New Delhi today.

He lamented that fact that only two coordination committee meetings had been held so far in thesix months that the BJP-led coalition had been in power. ``This is an abysmal record by any standard,'' he remarked.

His views were shared by a Lok Shakti leader.

``The Bharatiya Janata Party has still to learn how to run a coalition,'' he asserted, ``In a situation where regional parties hold the balance, you cannot ignore their feelings.''

According to him, all outstanding issues could be amicably sorted out in a coordination committee meeting. ``The sorry spectacle of leaders speaking in different voices on sensitive issues could have been avoided,'' he felt.