Udham Singh assassinates former Punjab Governor Michael O'Dwyer in London

On March 13, 1940, inside Caxton Hall in Westminster, London, Indian revolutionary Udham Singh shot and killed Sir Michael O'Dwyer, the former Lieutenant Governor of Punjab. O'Dwyer had been the chief British administrator in Punjab during the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre and had consistently defended Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer's actions as a necessary military measure to crush anti-colonial rebellion.

Udham Singh, who had present at Amritsar during the 1919 massacre as a teenager and suffered deep psychological trauma from the ordeal, spent over two decades tracking those responsible. Traveling across Europe, Asia, and North America under various aliases, Singh associated with radical anti-colonial groups such as the Ghadar Party. On the afternoon of March 13, during a joint meeting of the East India Association and the Royal Central Asian Society at Caxton Hall, Singh approached O'Dwyer as the lecture concluded and fired several shots at close range from a concealed revolver, killing O'Dwyer instantly and wounding Secretary of State for India Lord Zetland.

Singh made no attempt to flee or resist arrest. At his trial at the Old Bailey, he gave his official name as 'Ram Mohammad Singh Azad' to signify national unity across India's Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh communities. He was convicted of murder and hanged at Pentonville Prison on July 31, 1940. His act sent shockwaves through wartime Britain and served as a dramatic, belated symbol of retribution for the innocent lives destroyed at Jallianwala Bagh twenty-one years earlier.