New Delhi: Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge on Saturday shared the hard upbringing he had after losing most of his family, including his mother, to the “murderous rampage” of Razakars in the post-Independence Hyderabad state, and said there were times when he slept in the forest.

“I walk with carpets under my feet today, but there was a time when I slept on leaves in the forest,” Kharge said in a heart-to-heart conversation with Independent MP Kapil Sibal in the latter's podcast series, ‘Dil Se’.

Kharge said that when he was six, he lost his mother, brother, sister and uncle to an attack by Razakars in Bidar.

“My father was working in the farm when Razakars torched our house, killing my mother and others. I was playing in the fields and was saved by my father, who took the hard call of leaving Bidar after my family was killed,” Kharge recalled.

After escaping the village, they faced rejection from their extended family who didn't want to invite the wrath of the Nizam's private militia by harbouring them, he said.

“So we spent some nights in the forest. Today, I walk with carpets under my feet, but as a six-year-old, I slept on forest leaves,” Kharge said.

He also spoke of his struggle with school education, which took him and his father to Kalburgi, where a good samaritan helped him get into a school.

“The school was in the mills where my father had got a part-time job. It had RSS teachers. After the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, several RSS cadres had come from Pune to Kalburgi in the Nizam state,” Kharge said, adding that there was no looking back after that.

Crediting his late father for whatever he is today, Kharge said, “He wanted the best for his only son after losing the whole family.”

Kharge went on to study law and became a leading light of the workers' movement, before rising through the ranks to become an MLA, an MP and the Congress chief.