HYDERABAD: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday said that Telangana would see the BJP being much more emphatic in its response to the TRS’ charges against the Centre and himself, indicating a harder line in the months leading to the Assembly elections due next year.

In a speech where he did not mince words, Modi in a clear reference to TRS leaders criticising him, said he had been ‘subject to such treatment, and even regular abuse by people but God had made me in such a way that the abuse I receive turns into nutrition for me.’

Modi was addressing a crowd of around 5,000 BJP leaders and workers from the party’s city unit at the Begumpet airport in the afternoon, during a brief stopover on way to Ramagundam from Visakhapatnam.

The Prime Minister, on his first visit to the city after the BJP’s national executive meet in July, and the party’s loss in the Munugode bypoll, made it clear to ‘the people’ who abuse him and the BJP that he was willing to take it and so would the BJP. But, ‘a fitting lesson will be taught if the aspirations of the people are thwarted. Those who indulge in such actions will not be spared,’ he said.