ND Tiwari: Success and scandals marked his long run in politics that began before India's Independence

ND Tiwari or Narayan Dutt Tiwari, former chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, died on Thursday (October 18) - his 93rd birthday, leaving behind a long and successful political career which began before India’s Independence. Apart from holding key portfolios at the Centre and becoming the CM of Uttar Pradesh three times, he was also the only Uttarakhand CM to complete a full term.

Here’s a glimpse of his political life - Success and scandals that marked his long run in politics

Tiwari 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. In the 1990s he floated his own All India Indira Congress (Tiwari) with Arjun Singh for a brief period. In 2017,  Tiwari announced his support for the Bharatiya Janata Party ahead of the assembly elections in Uttarakhand. 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 the Allahabad University In 1947, Tiwari became the president of the Allahabad University student union in 1947. In 1976, he became the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh for the first time. He will be remembered for being last Congress chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. 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. He lost his Nainital seat by just 800 votes in 1991. 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. In 2007, he accepted the governorship of Andhra Pradesh. Two years later, a video clip showing three women in bed with an elderly man in Raj Bhavan brought the veteran politician's career virtually to an end. Citing health grounds, he put in his papers and shifted to Dehradun. 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. 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.

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The veteran political leader breathed his last at the Max Super Speciality Hospital at 2 pm on Thursday after prolonged illness and treatment at the hospital, doctors said. He was 93.

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(With PTI inputs)

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