Dehradun: Bowing to the Supreme Court’s directive at last, 86-year-old former Uttarakhand Chief Minister and former Andhra Pradesh Governor Narayan Dutt Tiwari on Tuesday gave his blood sample for DNA profiling in a paternity suit, at his residence here amid tight security.
Local police, administrative and judicial officers, mediapersons, petitioner Rohit Shekhar, 32, who has been fighting a protracted battle claiming that Mr Tewari was his biological father and his mother Ujjwala Sharma, their advocate had reached ‘Anant Van’, the residence of Mr Tiwari at Forest Research Institute (FRI) here around 1015 hrs.
Delhi High Court representative, a team of health department including Doon Hospital CMS Dr B C Pathak, Mr Tiwari’s nephew Manish Tewari, apart from Shekhar and his mother, were present on the occasion.
The team remained inside for about four hours before coming out under tight security. The blood samples of Rohit Shekhar and his mother, Ujjwala who has been a political activist, have already been taken.
Earlier, it has been found that Ujjwala Sharma’s husband’s DNA did not match with Rohit Shekhar.
Before going into the house, both Ms Ujjawala and Shekhar had expressed happiness that their protracted legal battle to establish Shekhar’s ‘true identity’ seemed to be reaching its logical conclusion.
Octogenarian Tiwari, popular as NDT, who is a veteran Congress leader in the hill state, had taken recourse to all legal avenues in a bid to avoid giving his blood samples in the paternity suit.
In their order directing Mr Tiwari to stop litigating and give his blood sample, the Supreme Court had observed that irrespective of their stature, all were equal before law.
“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.
The paternity suit was filed by Shekhar in 2008 in Delhi High Court seeking its direction to declare the Congress leader as his biological father.
Tiwari had been directed to make himself available at his home in Dehra Dun on Tuesday before the district judge and a local civil surgeon to be accompanied by a pathologist.
The bench, which made it clear that Tiwari cannot escape from giving his blood sample, however, had agreed to the plea of his counsel and former Solicitor General Gopal Subramanium that some protection should be granted for maintaining confidentiality of the test to be carried out at the Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics laboratory in Hyderabad. The court had on Monday, however, turned down his plea seeking to maintain confidentiality of court proceedings in the paternity suit. (PTI)