People's Progressive Party president M Kayveas today said he would adhere to the advice of Deputy Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak and stop bashing fellow BN coalition member MIC and its leaders, including S Samy Vellu.

However his undertaking came with a caveat - he will not remain silent if MIC continues with its attacks against him and his party.

"As far as I'm concerned, I will take the advice and stop. No more MIC bashing...no more Samy Vellu bashing unless we are bashed," Kayveas was quoted as saying by Bernama today.

"The name calling must stop. We leaders react when the media question us again and again on the matter. I feel that senior politicians should show their maturity in handling such issues," he said.

The verbal spat between Samy Vellu and Kayveas has been dragging for over a month now.

Their tit-for-tat reactions were first highlighted in the Tamil newspapers and eventually the English dailies too caught a whiff of them.

The situation grew out of hand and finally resulted in Najib telling both the leaders to cool it off. Najib advised them to immediately cease bickering openly and avoid challenging each other.

The issue started when Kayveas said that MIC, the largest Indian-based political party in the country, had done little to uplift the status of the Malaysian Indian community.

The spat became full blown and the war of words reached its climax last week, when the MIC said it would forward a request to the BN to have PPP expelled from the ruling coalition for criticising a BN component party in public.

MIC vice president S Sothinathan had also filed a defamation suit against Kayveas and Tamil daily Makkal Osai over remarks which allegedly disparaged MIC.

PPP to submit report

According to the Bernama report today, Kayveas described Najib's advice as timely, saying: "This should not have come to this level until the deputy prime minister had to issue an advice."

"We in the PPP speak up on certain issues and we got rebuked and one thing led to another...so I think since the advice has come from the number two leader of the country, we should just abide by it," said Kayveas, who is also the deputy minister in the prime minister's department.

He added that a continuous bickering between the two parties would not look good on the BN, especially with the general election looming.

Meanwhile, in a report in Makkal Osai today, Kayveas was quoted as saying that PPP would be submitting a report against MIC to the BN supreme council.

He was quoted as saying at a press conference yesterday that it was MIC which had started the attacks and was "trying to complaint now that we (PPP) have been bashing them".