Jallianwala Bagh massacre 104th anniversary: Who was Sardar Udham Singh? How he eliminated General Dyer

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre took place on 13 April in 1919 in Punjab. After the tragedy, Sardar Udham Singh avenged his people by killing the British officer serving as Governor General of Punjab, Michael O'Dwyer. 

Born on December 26, 1899, Udham Singh was a member of the Ghadar Party and the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association (HSRA). The assassination of Michael O'Dwyer, the ex-lieutenant governor of Punjab, brought him widespread notoriety. Singh carried out the murder in retaliation for the 1919 slaughter at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. 

The recognized martyr (born Sher Singh) was born to Tehal Singh, a manual laborer, and Narain Kaur, a housekeeper, in the vicinity of Pilbad, some 130 miles from British India's Lahore. His older brother Sadhu was two years older than him, making him the youngest. They lost both parents at an early age, both to separate mishaps. 

The boys were taken from their previous caretaker and placed in a Khalsa Orphanage. Sadhu changed his name to Mukta at the same time as Sher Singh became Udham Singh. Udham enlisted in the British Indian Army during World War I after the loss of his older brother from a serious illness.

Jallianwala Bagh Massacre 
British police detained many Indian National Congress leaders in their area, including Saifuddin Kitchlew and Satyapal, on charges of breaking the Rowlatt Act. After a week, as many as 20,000 people gathered to Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar to celebrate Baisakhi, a significant holiday in the Sikh faith, and to peacefully protest the arrests. When British forces led by Colonel Reginald Dyer opened fire, Uddham and his comrades had just finished providing water and other refreshments to the gathering. The Jallianwala Massacre was the savage murder of hundreds of innocent people.

Udham joined the Indian Independence Movement and revolutionary movements after witnessing the horrible murder of his siblings. He was motivated by Bhagat Singh and the HSRA as a whole. In 1924, he joined the Ghadar Party and helped organise expatriate Indians to overthrow British colonial control in India.

On Bhagat Singh's instructions, he loaded up on ammunition and weapons and headed back to India in 1927. The British government put him behind bars for five years for similar reasons.

Assassinating General O'Dwyer 
British authorities closely monitored his whereabouts after his release from jail in 1931. Even though he was being followed all the while, he managed to go to Kashmir and then Germany. In 1934, he had made his way to London, where he actively sought work. He plotted to kill Michael O'Dwyer, the man responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, on parallel hands. 

On March 13, 1940, in Caxton Hall in London, General O'Dwyer was slated to preside over a joint conference of the Central Asian Society and the East India Association. Udham joined the competition under his wife's identity while concealing a handgun in a book. At the conclusion of the conference, he fatally shot General O'Dwyer twice. The attempted assassination also resulted in the injury of many other British officers.

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He was hanged in July of 1940, but not before inspiring millions of Indians to fight for their independence. A district in Uttarakhand was given the name Udham Singh Nagar by the Mayawati administration in honour of the great martyr of India. Besides the museum in Amritsar, his name appears on a number of other public buildings.