Sir Michael O'Dwyer

Sir Michael Francis O'Dwyer was the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab during the First World War and the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. He was born in County Tipperary, Ireland, on 28 April 1864, joined the Indian Civil Service and arrived in India in 1885. He took charge of Punjab in May 1913, after the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, warned him that Punjab was the province that most worried the government.

Key moments

• 1914 to 1918: he organised the recruitment of soldiers for the war with the help of rural leaders. Wikipedia says 360,000 of India's recruits came from Punjab, more than half the total, and that he helped secure the Defence of India Act of 1915.
• 9 and 10 April 1919: the Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that he decided to deport Dr Satyapal and Dr Saif ud-Din Kitchlew from Amritsar and banned Mahatma Gandhi from entering Punjab. The two were arrested on 10 April, which led to a strike and to the firing and violence that followed in the city.
• 13 April 1919: Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire without warning on a crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, on Baisakhi. The official toll was 379 dead and 1,200 wounded; Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya put the dead above 1,000. Wikipedia says O'Dwyer was told at 3 am the next day, and that when Dyer reported, a telegram went back reading "your action correct and the lieutenant-governor approves". The Tribune's survey of the 1919 press reports The Times' assumption that the Lieutenant-Governor's telegram approving Dyer's action was sent on insufficient knowledge.
• April 1919: martial law was proclaimed on 15 April, backdated to 30 March. Wikipedia adds that he could not disclaim responsibility for an aeroplane attack on Gujranwala, in which at least a dozen people died. He was relieved of his office after the disturbances.
• 1924: he won a libel case against Sir Sankaran Nair, who had written that a Lieutenant-Governor could commit the atrocities of 1919. He published India as I Knew It in 1925.
• 13 March 1940: Udham Singh, who had been in the Bagh in 1919, shot him dead at Caxton Hall in London. Udham Singh made no attempt to escape and was hanged at Pentonville prison on 31 July 1940.

Remembered for: the repression of 1919 and his public backing for Dyer. O'Dwyer contended, without evidence according to Wikipedia, that the gathering was part of a planned rebellion. A separate theory, put by the historian Raja Ram, holds that the massacre itself was a premeditated plan by O'Dwyer and others; Wikipedia says that historians including Nick Lloyd, K.L. Tuteja, Anita Anand and Kim Wagner found no evidence for it.