ND Tiwari drifts towards BJP, son may get ticket

New Delhi: Ninety-one-year-old former Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand chief minister and Congress stalwart Narayan Datt Tiwari, and his son Rohit Shekhar, on Wednesday met BJP chief Amit Shah and extended their support to the saffron party for the forthcoming Assembly election in the hill state.

Though there was no official confirmation from the Bharatiya Janata Party on the father-son duo joining the party, Mr Shekhar said they are with the BJP and will campaign for it. However, speculations have been rife that Mr Shekhar is desperate for an electoral debut.

He wanted to contest from Lalkuan from where the BJP has already fielded a candidate. But Uttarkhand BJP is abuzz that Mr Shekhar could be fielded from Haldwani, from where Congress stalwart and state Cabinet minister Indira Hridayesh is an MLA.

Speculation is also rife that Ms Hridayesh, once considered N.D. Tiwari’s protégé, is in touch with the BJP as the Congress in the state is facing a bitter infighting, which could dent its poll prospects. The BJP has fielded more than a dozen former Congress leaders in the hill state.

N.D. Tiwari has not been active in politics for some years now. After reports suggesting that he and his son have joined the BJP, Uttarakhand Congress secretary Manishi Tiwari, who is N.D. Tiwari’s nephew, issued a statement.

“The (Tiwari) family is extremely dissapointed, in fact, shocked, at the developments… We are a longstanding Congress family of freedom fighters and we have reason to belive that Tiwariji would never desert the Congress on his own volition,” Manishi Tiwari said.

Apparently blaming Rohit Shekhar, the Uttarakhand Congress secretary said the decision (to join the BJP) are being made for him by “others keeping in mind their own inetersts and agendas.”

The nonagenarian leader’s immediate family members had refused to accept Rohit Shekhar as part of the family. Even the nonagenarian leader was forced to accept Rohit Shekhar as his biological son, following a court drama, and had married his mother Ujjwala Sharma in 2014.

Since then, Rohit Shekhar has been trying to chart a political carrer for which he had earlier approached the Congress high command also with his father.

The Akhilesh Yadav-led UP government had appointed him as an adviser in the transport department. This was the result of N.D. Tiwari’s s proximity with Mulayam Singh Yadav.