No escape as Tiwari forced to give blood in paternity case

New Delhi Veteran Congress party leader Narayan Dutt Tiwari on Tuesday gave a blood sample in a four-year-old paternity suit after exhausting all legal options to escape DNA testing.

Tiwari gave a blood sample to determine if he fathered a son out of wedlock. The sample was given in front of district judge Raj Krishna, chief medical superintendent of Government Doon Hospital, B.C. Pathak, Rohit Shekhar, who has filed the paternity suit, and his mother Ujjwala Sharma, amid tight security at his Dehradun residence.

Rohit Shekhar, 32, had petitioned the Delhi High Court in 2008 for the second time asking for Tiwari to be declared his biological father while Tiwari was the Andhra Pradesh governor.

He was forced to step down in 2009 after getting caught in a scandal with two sex workers, although Tiwari claimed he quit due to health reasons.

While Tiwari enjoyed judicial immunity while serving as the governor, the case gathered momentum after he quit. He managed to avoid the judicial system, refraining from either appearing in court or giving a blood sample, until the Delhi High Court ordered its registrar on May 16 to take police assistance to bring him to the court dispensary and collect a sample.

His last ditch effort to get relief from the Supreme Court also failed last week, as the apex court dismissed Tiwari’s claim on May 24 that he was too old to give a blood sample.

“It does not mean that blood is not running in his body,” the Judges had said. “If you are so clean, you go and give your blood sample. Can the order of the court be flouted only because of the stature of a person,” a bench comprising Justices Deepak Verma and S J Mukhopadhaya had said.

Colourful personality

The Supreme Court judges, however, agreed to Tiwari’s request to maintain confidentiality of the test, which will be carried out at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics laboratory in Hyderabad while agreeing that at 86, he was fit enough to travel to Delhi just to give his blood sample and directed that the same be collected from his Dehradun residence.

Tuesday was the last date for Tiwari to voluntarily give his blood sample failing which the officials would have been within rights to force him.

Tiwari, as much famous for his oratory skills as his colourful personality, had initially fought Rohit Shekhar’s claim of being his son by saying that a paternity test conducted under court order would amount to a violation of his privacy.

Rohit on his part submitted photographs with Tiwari from his childhood to establish that until he took over as the chief minister of Uttaranchal (now Uttarakhand) in 2002 he had no qualms accepting him as his son in private.

Tiwari served as the chief minister of undivided Uttar Pradesh thrice and worked as the foreign minister of India. He narrowly missed becoming prime minister of the country in 1991 before serving another five-year tenure as the chief minister of Uttarakhand and then being appointed Andhra Pradesh governor.

He now leads a retired life at the Uttarakhand capital Dehradun.