Former Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister ND Tiwari, who served in various positions at the Centre and in States and was even a strong contender for prime ministership in 1991, died on his 93rd birthday at a private Hospital in the national Capital on Thursday after prolonged illness. The veteran politician was admitted to the hospital on September 20, 2017 after suffering a brain stroke and had been there since then.
Tiwari, a Congress veteran, had been in hospital for over a year. A team of doctors was monitoring his condition round the clock. A three-day State mourning has been announced in Uttarakhand.
Tiwari had been admitted to the Max Hospital since September last year, after suffering a brain stroke. In July, he was shifted to the ICU after multiple organ failure, his condition was described by hospital sources as “very serious”.
A former Chief Minister of Uttarakhand, Tiwari was also Chief Minister of undivided Uttar Pradesh thrice. He also served as the Governor of Andhra Pradesh for two years after which he resigned in 2009 after allegations of a sex scandal at the Raj Bhawan.
A political heavyweight once, Tiwari was even considered a potential candidate to be Prime Minister in the early 1990s. He quit the Congress in 1994 and launched his own party the Congress (Tiwari) along with another prominent Congressman Arjun Singh, but they later returned when Sonia Gandhi took over as Congress president.
In 2008, Rohit Shekhar filed a paternity suit claiming that Tiwari was his biological father. The result in 2012 of a court-ordered DNA test proved the claim right. Tiwari pleaded with the media to let him be himself. “I have every right to live my life my way. No one has the right to look into my private life. Please respect my privacy,” he was quoted as saying. In 2014, Tiwari married Shekhar’s mother Ujjwala Sharma in Lucknow, finding a new family in the mother and son at the age of 88.
Tiwari had won his first election on a Praja Samajwadi Party ticket from Nainital in 1952. A decade later, he joined the Congress and stuck with it for most of his life.
There was a brief period, however, in the 1990s when he floated his own All India Indira Congress (Tiwari) with Arjun Singh also on board.
And last year, long after he had outlived his usefulness for his party, Tiwari openly announced his support for the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of the Assembly elections in Uttarakhand. Tiwari’s political career began before Independence. As a teenager, he was jailed for 15 months in Nainital prison, according to one account for writing anti-British pamphlets, where his freedom fighter father too was lodged.
On his release, he joined Allahabad University, becoming the president of its student union in 1947. In 1976, he became the Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh for the first time. Two more stints followed in the 1980s. They were all brief, truncated terms but he will be remembered for being the last Congress Chief Minister of the populous, politically important State.
At the Centre, Tiwari served as Deputy Chairperson of the Planning Commission. Over the years, he also held portfolios of planning, finance, petroleum and external affairs in the Union Cabinet. Tiwari is said to have nurtured prime ministerial aspirations at one time, and there was speculation that he was in the running in 1991 when the party eventually picked PV Narasimha Rao. That was also the year when he lost his Nainital seat by just 800 votes.
He was the third Chief Minister of the newly formed Uttarakhand State but the first one to complete a full term, from 2002 to 2007. He continues to hold the distinction of having been the only Uttarakhand CM who has done so. Tiwari is credited with helping the infant State, formed just two years before he took charge, gain a firm footing.
