New Delhi: Former CPM general secretary Prakash Karat on Tuesday contradicted successor Sitaram Yechury's claim that he had offered to resign after his political line was defeated on Sunday.

"He didn't offer to resign. The question has come naturally from the media but that is not something which we have entertained seriously," Karat, asked about the matter, told the online newspaper, The Print.

Asked about Karat's remarks, Yechury said that he had offered to resign after his draft political resolution was voted out in the party central committee in Calcutta.

"I offered to resign both in the politburo and the central committee. I was told to continue as general secretary as it would otherwise send a wrong message that the party was divided," Yechury told reporters. "The general view was that such a message should not go out on the eve of the Tripura elections (in February) and ahead of the party congress (in Hyderabad in April). So I abided by the majority view."

While Karat's remarks have come as a surprise to some of those who attended Sunday's meeting, they saw it as an effort to project unity.

Many are privately discussing, though, whether the differences would lead to a change of guard at the top with the hardliners getting Yechury to step down at the end of his three-year term in April. The party constitution allows a general secretary three terms, and Karat had served his consecutively.

Karat's backers are already citing how then general secretary P. Sundarayya had offered to resign in 1975 after his line against any truck with the RSS-Jana Sangh was voted out by the party, which favoured a united fight against the Emergency. He eventually stepped down in 1978, when the party ended an underground stint.

Yechury's supporters are countering this by highlighting the instance of former general secretary Harkishan Singh Surjeet.

Surjeet's view that the CPM should participate in the United Front government, which had offered Jyoti Basu the Premiership, was defeated at two central committee meetings in 1996. The party congress endorsed the negative vote in 1998. But Surjeet remained general secretary till 2005.