It was his birthday. He turned 93 on the same day of his death. But as the day progressed, Narayan Dutt Tiwari popularly known as ND Tiwari breathed his last at Max Hospital, Saket in New Delhi following a prolonged illness. He was suffering from pneumonia and had suffered a brain stroke in September in 2017. He was born on October 18, 1925.
ND Tiwari was born in a Kumauni family, years after his father Poornanand Tiwari had resigned from his forest department job to join the Non-cooperation Movement of Mahatma Gandhi in 1920-22.
Two decades later, when Mahatma Gandhi launched Quit India Movement in 1942, ND Tiwari joined the movement and became a life-long political activist. He was a member of All India Student Congress till 1949 but post-Independence, ND Tiwari contested assembly election as a Praja Socialist Party candidate.
ND Tiwari became an MLA in Uttar Pradesh Assembly in 1952 winning from the Nainital constituency. He retained the assembly segment in 1957 and became the leader of Opposition in the UP Assembly.
ND Tiwari joined the Congress party in 1963. He won from Kashipur assembly seat (now in Uttarakhand) in 1965 and became a minister in the UP government. He went on to become the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh three times.
First chief ministership came ND Tiwari’s way in 1976 for about 15 months. It was followed by his joining hands with the Janata Party forces. He was the finance minister and the parliamentary affairs minister in Chaudhary Charan Singh government in 1979-80 at the Centre. ND Tiwari returned to Congress after the Janata Party experiment failed and got his second chief ministership of Uttar Pradesh in 1984. The second tenure was of 13 months. But then, it was followed by two high-profile portfolios in the Rajiv Gandhi government at the Centre.
He held the external affairs and finance portfolios during 1986-88 before returning to Uttar Pradesh as chief minister for the third and final time. It lasted for little over 17 months.
Tiwari was once considered a potential prime ministerial candidate in the Congress after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination that was followed by an election victory in 1991. But ND Tiwari lost that election by just 800 votes.
ND Tiwari was the only politician to have served as the chief minister of two states. He became the chief minister of Uttarakhand in 2002 and completed a full five-year term for the first time in his political career.
He later served as the Governor of Andhra Pradesh from 2007 to 2009, when first a sex scandal of two major controversies broke out and he was forced to resign. A Telugu news channel aired a video showing ND Tiwari in bed with three women at Raj Bhavan in Hyderabad. ND Tiwari never occupied a constitutional post again.
The other major controversy involving ND Tiwari was a paternity suit filed by Rohit Shekhar, who claimed that the former Uttar Pradesh chief minister was his biological father. The court ordered a DNA test to establish the claim. ND Tiwari first refused to give a sample for the DNA test only to be forced by the Delhi High Court.
Paternity test was decided in favour of Rohit Shekhar in 2012, four years after the suit was filed. In 2014, ND Tiwari married Ujjwala Tiwari, the mother of Rohit Shekhar in Lucknow.
Having been associated with the Congress for most part of his active political career, ND Tiwari was seen sympathetic towards the BJP announcing his support for the party for Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. As a result, one year, prior to his death and the assembly elections in Uttarakhand, he joined the Bharatiya Janata Party in 2017.
