Narayan Datt Tiwari was born to a Kumaoni Brahmin[5] family in 1925, in the village of Baluti located in Nainital district of Uttarakhand state.

[8] His initiation into politics came early, when during the Indian Independence movement, he was arrested on 14 December 1942 for writing Anti-British leaflets opposing imperialist policies, and sent to Nainital jail, where his father was already lodged.

[12] In 1963, he joined the Indian National Congress party, and was elected Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the Kashipur constituency in 1965 and was subsequently appointed a minister in the Government of Uttar Pradesh.

[16] Tiwari was the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh three times: from January 1976 to April 1977, from August 1984 to September 1985 and from June 1988 to December 1988.

[8] He was an unsuccessful contender to be Prime Minister of India in the early 1990s but was pipped to the post by P. V. Narasimha Rao.

[23] Following a controversy over his involvement in a sex scandal, he resigned as the governor on 27 December 2009, citing "health grounds";[24] subsequently he relocated to Dehradun, Uttarakhand.

[25] A lifelong Congressman,[26] Tiwari along with his son Rohit Shekhar (advocate and former advisor, Government of Uttar Pradesh) and his wife Ujjwala, Tiwari gave his blessings and support to Narendra Modi and the BJP for the assembly elections held in the states of Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh in presence of BJP President Amit Shah in the name of development.

[29][30] On 14 May 2013, he married Ujjwala Tiwari (née Singh), his longtime girlfriend and mother of his biological son Rohit Shekhar, at the age of 88.

[36] On 27 December 2009, E. S. L. Narasimhan was appointed to discharge the duties of governor for the region until regular arrangements for the office were made.

[25] On 27 July 2011, the Delhi High Court, citing a need to end the controversy, rejected a request from Tiwari's lawyers to keep his paternity test result a secret.

[40][41] On 14 May 2013, two years after the paternity test, Tiwari married Rohit Shekhar's mother, Ujjwala Singh Sharma, in a ceremony in Lucknow which had some religious elements, but was mainly a registered marriage.

The family lived in a large government bungalow (No.3, Krishna Menon Marg), where N.D. Tiwari was a frequent visitor.

After her death, Ujjwala reportedly tried to claim her place, but was rebuffed by Tiwari; an incident happened in 1995 when Ujjwala and Rohit tried to enter Tiwari's official residence to meet him, but were stopped and pushed back by his security guards, after which they sat in protest outside his house, to no avail.

Tiwari had totally distanced himself from Ujjwala by this time; the scandal of marrying the divorced mother of two would ruin his career, which was at its zenith in the period 1991–96, under P.V.

[43] He had allegedly been smothered to death by his wife Apoorva, at a time when he was drunk and unable to resist the attack.

According to the testimony of Ujjwala and others, Apoorva had married Rohit with an eye on his family property and with the idea that he would become a powerful politician under his father's tutelage.