New Delhi, Oct. 18: BJP president Amit Shah has warned motormouths in his party to stop venting their views on "contentious" issues, apparently prodded by the Prime Minister who feels "irreparable image damage" has been caused by such statements.

However, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has not yet spoken out on the lynching of Mohammed Akhlaque in Dadri and similar incidents stemming from intolerance, other than describing them as "sad".

Shah's intervention came on a day a trucker who was set ablaze by miscreants over rumours of cow slaughter in Jammu's Udhampur district on October 9 succumbed to his injuries in Delhi's Safdarjung hospital.

Zahid Ahmad Bhat, 20, had received 70 per cent burns when a petrol bomb was lobbed on a Kashmir-bound truck near Shiv Nagar in Udhampur district. His associate Showkat Ahmad Dar suffered 40 per cent burns.

This morning. Shah summoned Haryana chief minister Manohar Lal Khattar, junior minister Sanjeev Kumar Balyan, MP Sakshi Maharaj and Uttar Pradesh MLA Sangeet Som and reportedly gave them a dressing down for holding forth on incidents like the Dadri killing and beef eating. Mahesh Sharma, a central minister in whose constituency Dadri falls, was spared, although he had initially dismissed the tragedy as an "accident" and the "result of a misunderstanding".

Shah's diktat came after Modi last night nudged him to rein in such "elements" because of the "irreparable image damage" they caused to his government and himself, a BJP source said.

The incessant inflammatory comments from rabble-rousers associated with the BJP have caused restiveness within the party as well as the NDA coalition.

Last week, defence minister Manohar Parrikar said they "damaged the vision that the Prime Minister has, and, therefore, they cannot be in the interest of the BJP, the NDA and the country".

On Saturday, BJP ally Akali Dal's MP Naresh Gujral had said "it's high time the BJP leadership took action against one such person so that there is some kind of sanity back in national affairs".

A source attributed the Prime Minister's "anger" to his perception that "each such statement derailed his agenda of fighting poverty and generating jobs by bringing in investments from abroad".

Shah's message was also communicated to the RSS that has not been far behind the BJP motormouths in stoking the embers.

The cover story in the latest edition of the Panchjanya, an RSS-aligned publication, claims the Vedas "order the killing of the sinner who kills a cow".

A little after Shah's morning meeting with the BJP members, RSS spokesperson Manmohan Vaidya distanced his organisation from the journal and tweeted that the Panchjanya and its English counterpart, the Organiser, were not Sangh mouthpieces. "An official office-bearer alone speaks on behalf of the RSS," he said.

In Bihar, the RSS issued a statement saying that its chief Mohan Madhukar Bhagwat's comments on the reservation policy had been "distorted".