Bharatiya Janata Party patriarch LK Advani on Monday dropped an indirect hint that he was against the conscience vote to decide the upcoming presidential election that alone can help former Lok Sabha speaker PA Sangma backed by his party surmount the huge majority to UPA candidate Pranab Mukherjee.

"Conscience vote in the singular is a virtue, but conscience vote in the plural is a conspiracy," he writes in his latest blog, recalling his comment on the oddest 1969 election in which the then prime minister Indira Gandhi got VV Giri elected with a "conscience vote" to defeat official Congress candidate Neelam Sanjiva Reddy for the presidentship.

He refers to a question hurled at the BJP as if support to Sangma against Mukherjee was "something improper": Should not an election to this high constitutional office be a unanimous election, based on a consensual agreement arrived at between government and the Opposition? "I hold that the answer to this question depends entirely on the attitude of the ruling party," he affirmed.

Advani points out that when the prime minister phoned him for support within minutes of Sonia announcing the candidature of Mukherjee, his comment was "You are now only informing us; would it not have been better if you had consulted the Opposition before making the announcement?" The PM's reaction, according to Advani, was, "Well, it is never too late to mend."

Shortly, another call came from Pranab that he had been nominated but he did not ask for support. Instead, he just reminisced about how since 1970 we had been together in parliament, sharing bonds of mutual esteem and affection. "You may have forgotten," he said, "but I do recall how on the day I retired from the Rajya Sabha you insisted on the two of us having lunch together in the Central Hall. Advani writes that he remembers "how warm and cordial our interaction was not just for that day, but has been for all these years."