ND Tiwari with son Rohit Shekhar. (File Photo)Rohit Shekhar Tiwari was involved in a public and long-drawn battle to prove that late Uttar Pradesh chief minister N D Tiwari was his father. With Rohit’s death, his family finds itself in public attention again.
Shekhar, 40, was born on February 15, 1979, to three-time Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Uttarakhand Chief Minister and Congress leader N D Tiwari and Dr Ujjwala Tiwari, a former Sanskrit lecturer and daughter of Haryana political leader Sher Singh.
His paternal uncle Bhaskar Bhatt remembers him as a serious and bookish child. “He wasn’t very interested in childish pleasures. He was keen on keeping up with current affairs through magazines. He enjoyed history and was particularly fond of Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings…”
Shekhar did an LLB from Delhi University’s Faculty of Law. His career as an advocate was overshadowed by the paternity case against Tiwari, which he filed at the Delhi High Court in 2007.
In accounts to The Indian Express at that time, Tiwari had been a shadowy presence in Shekhar’s life, visiting them occasionally, and Rohit was told that Tiwari was his biological father at age 12. However, these visits stopped a few years later.
In 2012, the Supreme Court directed Tiwari to submit his blood for a DNA test, which established him as his biological father. In 2014, Tiwari publicly acknowledged and accepted Shekhar as his son.
According to Bhatt, while he was keen on carrying forward the political legacy of his father — who died last year — he was particularly interested in working for healthcare and education in remote areas.
