Search for a DNA

The next Rohit met him was in 2002,when Tiwari was chief minister of Uttarakhand. Rohit was 23 then. “I thought he’s nearing 80 and I am his son and I should speak to him,” he says. So,Rohit,along with Ujjwala’s parents,set off to Dehra Dun where they met Tiwari.

Rohit,who was studying in Delhi then,says that over the next few years,he would visit Dehra Dun every couple of months but Tiwari always put him up in a hotel. Ujjwala,meanwhile,says she stayed with a relative in Dehra Dun during that period,but visited Tiwari regularly.

“In private,he would say,‘you look like me,your nose looks like mine’. He would talk to me sometimes about Jawaharlal Nehru or about how Harivansh Rai Bachchan taught him in Allahabad University. But he never acknowledged me in public and that hurt,” says Rohit,who did his B.Com (Hons) in economics from Kirori Mal College and then law from Delhi University.

The next turning point in the relationship came on Tiwari’s birthday on October 18,2005. “Many people had come to celebrate his birthday. We too took a cake with us and went inside a big hall where they were celebrating but his gunmen politely told us to go to another room. That day Rohit got angry and said,‘Amma,he will never accept me,’” says Ujjwala.

After that,says Rohit,Tiwari refused to meet him. On December 7 that year,when Tiwari came to Delhi,Rohit says he went to the airport to meet him but he refused to talk to him. “He was in a starched kurta and with starch in his personality,he put on his dark glasses like MGR and just drove off,” says his mother. They followed him to the hotel where he had arrived for a meeting with Bill Gates. “I sent in a note saying I wanted to meet him but he just crumpled it and threw it,” says Rohit.

Rohit then shot off letters—at least 10,000 of them,he says—to judges,politicians and others in Uttarakhand,telling them about his relationship with Tiwari. Finally,in September 2007,he filed a paternity suit in the Delhi High Court,submitting nearly 150 photographs that showed him and his mother with Tiwari.

“I am not insane to target him (Tiwari) for nothing. Why would I choose him,why not Obama or Shah Rukh Khan?” says Rohit. “I have suffered from insomnia for years. I suffered a heart attack and a brain stroke at 28. Why would I do all this for publicity? Initially,I used to get angry with my mother too for giving me a father like him (Tiwari) but I understand her,” he says.

On May 24 this year,the Supreme Court rejected Tiwari’s appeal,ordering him to provide his blood sample to decide the paternity suit. When Rohit and his mother accompanied a special team to Tiwari’s residence in Dehra Dun to take his blood sample on May 29,he says he was seeing him after seven years. “He asked me,‘tumhari padhai kaisi chal rahi hai (how are your studies progressing)?’ I said,‘Thanks to you,Mr Tiwari,I am running from pillar to post,from court to court,so I am learning a lot.”

Rohit says he will decide his course of action once the results of the DNA tests come in. “If the tests show—which I am sure they will—that I am Mr Tiwari’s biological son,I will lay a claim to whatever is rightfully and legally mine,” says Rohit,who intends to devote more time now to his legal career.

Incidentally,political leaders in Uttarakhand say Tiwari does not own much property. “He just has a house in Lucknow and that’s in his wife’s name,” says a politician in Uttarakhand.

For Rohit,the case has deeper implications. “This suit has set a precedent. Usually,paternity cases are filed by the adults involved,not by the child. I want to remove the word ‘bastard’ from the legal lexicon. My mother has been called an unchaste woman but what is the corresponding term for a man? She trusted him (Tiwari),” he says.

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Ujjwala Sharma says she was 24 when she first met N D Tiwari. Tiwari,then 43,was president of the All India Youth Congress and she a Sanskrit lecturer at Daulat Ram College in Delhi University. Both were already married. Tiwari,she says,dropped by frequently to meet her father,Prof Sher Singh,a political leader from Haryana and then a minister in Indira Gandhi’s Cabinet.

“During 1967 and ’68,he visited my father frequently and his visits grew more frequent as he became interested in me,” says Ujjwala,who went on to become joint secretary of the All India Young Women’s Congress. “Tiwariji initiated me into it,” she says. He also encouraged her to volunteer with the Jawaharlal Nehru National Youth Centre,an organisation he headed in those days.

“He realised I was in a failed marriage,” says Ujjwala,who married Bipin Sharma,a businessman,in 1962. The couple,who have a 44-year-old son,finally divorced in 2006 but continue to live together,though on different floors,in their south Delhi home. “He was a bad husband but a good father,” says Rohit of Sharma. Two DNA tests have ruled out that Sharma is Rohit’s biological father.

Ujjwala,now 67,says Tiwari courted her persistently over the years. “He would say,‘You are always busy with your teaching job and social activities but you are alone’. But I was always evasive,” says Ujjwala,who has a PhD in Sanskrit from Delhi University.

Then came Emergency in 1975,after which Ujjwala’s father Sher Singh drifted away from Indira Gandhi. After Emergency,when the Janata Party won and formed the first non-Congress government in 1977,Sher Singh returned to power as a minister of state at the Centre. Ujjwala says Tiwari,who kept away from her father during the Emergency years,now resumed his visits.

“He would cry and say his wife couldn’t have a child and that we should have one. Initially,I told him let’s get divorced and then marry but he said,‘You are in your thirties,I am in my fifties. Let’s have a child first and we can marry later when everything is sorted.’”

Ujjwala says that in those days,Tiwari showed much concern for her and even her elder son Siddharth,picking him up from St Columba’s in Delhi if his school bus didn’t come and taking him to a dispensary when he got hurt once. “This time he succeeded in getting close to me. I thought if someone could be interested in me for this long,there must be something to it,” she says.

On February 15,1979,Rohit was born. Ujjwala and her son’s relationship with Tiwari,she says,has been an interrupted one,one that culminated in a court battle that has stretched for five years and is now nearing its end.

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It’s been over a week since N D Tiwari gave his blood sample for a DNA test but he is still reluctant to talk about it. “What is there to talk about? The High Court had ordered that I give my blood sample and I did. So that issue is settled,” he says.

After submitting his sample in the presence of a special team at his home in Dehra Dun,Tiwari left for Delhi,where he underwent a checkup at AIIMS. Now back in Dehra Dun,the 87-year-old is busy meeting people at his home. “They come from all over with their issues,” he says. Tiwari’s nephew Manishi,the son of his younger brother,also spends considerable time in Dehra Dun after he left his job with Oxfam a couple of years ago and joined politics. “He is making his own way in politics like I did mine,” says Tiwari.

But if there is one issue that he is eager to steer clear of,it’s that of the paternity suit. Over the last few years,he has tried his best to resist a DNA test. A source close to his family says,“He was exploring his legal options before he did that. They (Ujjwala and Rohit) have submitted photographs of themselves with Tiwari cutting a birthday cake or at a function but that doesn’t mean anything. There are hundreds of other photographs of him at the birthday parties of children of his staff,so what does that mean? And why did he (Rohit) wait to be a ripe 28 before filing a case,” he asks.

Tiwari,meanwhile,counters,“Why should I have given my blood for nothing? Now when the court said I should,I did. This is part of history now. These are private matters. Why should they be probed,” he asks.

THE CASE FILE

September 2007

Rohit Shekhar files a paternity case against Congress leader N D Tiwari in the Delhi High Court

November 25,2008

Delhi High Court summons Tiwari,then Governor of Andhra Pradesh,to appear before it. It was the first time that a court in India had summoned a Governor

September 2009

A single bench of the Delhi High Court dismisses Rohit’s suit,saying it was out of its jurisdiction since Tiwari was in Andhra Pradesh

March 2010

A division bench of the High Court overrules the decision

December 2010

A single bench of the HC says this is a “case in which there is an eminent need for a DNA test”. Tiwari’s appeal is dismissed. The court makes a distinction between biological paternity and legal presumption of parenthood. Tiwari goes in appeal against the verdict in the Supreme Court

May 24,2012

The Supreme Court asks Tiwari to comply with the HC order to submit his sample for a DNA test

May 29

Tiwari gives his sample for the DNA test. His samples,along with those of Rohit Shekhar and Ujjwala Sharma,have been sent to the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics in Hyderabad