New Delhi: BJP veteran LK Advani met senior leaders, including beleaguered party chief Nitin Gadkari, who came to greet him on his 85th birthday on Thursday.

As per reports, Gadkari met Advani soliciting his support as BJP stalwart had earlier backed him.

Importantly, Advani yesterday skipped the BJP Core Group meeting despite repeated requests by his party colleagues.

Sources claimed that Advani is miffed with the BJP’s ideological mentor -the RSS- for not taking any action against Gadkari after he equated the IQ levels of spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda with that of underworld don Dawood Ibrahim.

Since then, Advani is believed to be unhappy with the Nagpur leader.

In the recent past, the relations between the RSS central leadership and Advani have also soured. The RSS, which is believed to have intervened in the Gadkari issue, asked the BJP leaders to toe the party line and support its chosen man.

The RSS had entrusted the task of mediating on behalf of Gadkari to its ideologue S Gurumurthy, who later gave him a clean chit saying, he had done nothing wrong.

Gurumurthy also said that the allegations of financial irregularities against Gadkari’s company Purti Sugar and Power Pvt Ltd were utterly baseless.

Gurumurthy, who has been managing the crisis and meeting with senior BJP leaders on behalf of Gadkari and RSS after noted lawyer and party MP Ram Jethmalani openly attacked Gadkari and demanded his immediate resignation as President, said Gadkari was clean.

The BJP president met Sushma Swaraj and Rajnath Singh on Wednesday. Meanwhile, senior lawyer and BJP leader Ram Jethmalani insisted Gadkari needed to resign if the BJP was to reclaim the moral ground in the battle against corruption.