Bhopal, Aug. 6 :    Bhopal, Aug. 6:  It's a classic case of politicians having no fixed friends. Riven by faction feuds and rampant back-stabbing, the BJP in Madhya Pradesh has been thrown into a leadership crisis after Lakhiram Agarwal's open challenge to former mentor and state BJP heavyweight Sunderlal Patwa. The faction war took a vicious turn after July 14, when Rajya Sabha member Vikram Verma was elected president of the state unit. Verma's thumping victory by securing 206 of the 291 votes shook the top brass. Verma was not backed by party president Kushbhau Thakre or state stalwarts Uma Bharti and Patwa. He was nominated by Lakhiram, a tendu-leaf-trader-turned-politician from Chhattisgarh who is in charge of the party's state affairs, but is better known as Patwa's Frankenstein. It was Patwa, a former chief minister, who brought Lakhiram into mainstream politics in the mid-eighties. Since 1989, Patwa had got him elected twice as the state unit chief beating heavyweights like Virendra Kumar Saklecha and Kailash Joshi - both former chief ministers. But Chhattisgarh has changed priorities. The simmering tension between him and Lakhiram boiled over after the Union rural development minister decided to project Brijmohan Agarwal, an MLA from Raipur, over Lakhiram's son Amar Agarwal, an MLA from Bilaspur, as the BJP's face for Chhattisgarh. The clash assumed serious dimensions in mid-April when Devji Bhai Patel, a rebel leader and president of Krishi Upaj Mandi, a farmers' association, announced a farmers' meet in Raipur, one of the two proposed capitals for Chhattisgarh. Lakhiram and state general secretary Gauri Shankar Agarwal appealed to the cadre to stay away from the meet which, they said, was 'not a BJP programme' and only intended to 'glorify certain people'. According to party sources, 'certain people' meant Patwa, his new protégé Brijmohan and Tarun Chatterjee, the mayor of Raipur. But Patwa loyalists, bent on proving that Brijmohan was the correct choice for the upcoming state, went ahead. Patwa himself agreed to be chief guest at the 40,000-strong rally, prompting Lakhiram to retaliate by asking Thakre to take action against Patwa. Matters came to a head after Thakre refused to take action against his long-time friend. Lakhiram waited for three months, before exacting his revenge in the elections. With both camps trading charges and counter-charges, polls were postponed several times. A party member from Bilaspur, Naval Goel, even went to court, alleging irregularities in the elections. As a result of the chaotic run-up, district-level polls which were supposed to be over by June 30, were only half complete by then. On July 11, all efforts to reach a consensus failed. Initially, four candidates filed nominations. Verma, the state unit working president, was the first, followed by Patwa's candidate Shivraj Singh Chouhan. Uma Bharti loyalist Prahlad Patel and Chaudhary Chandrabhan Singh, a former minister, also filed nominations but withdrew in Chouhan's favour. Patwa rushed to Thakre but couldn't persuade him to intervene. Desperate, he called a press conference alleging that a senior leader was taking sides in an organisational election. Lakhiram retaliated the next day, calling another press conference and accusing Patwa of washing dirty linen in public. The poll verdict has left Patwa with a battered ego and the realisation that he is fast losing ground to the man he himself once promoted. But even as the standoff continues between the former mentor and ex-protégé, the real victor of the BJP feud, say insiders, is chief minister Digvijay Singh. According to them, the chief minister has asked his men to ignore the Opposition's efforts to bring up in the Assembly the suicide deaths which followed the state government's retrenchment drive.