85th Death Anniversary of Udham Singh

Every year India observes July 31 as Shaheed Udham Singh Martyrdom Day.

Udham Singh was born Sher Singh on December 26, 1899, in the Sunam city of Sangrur districts.
After his father’s death, he and his older brother were raised in a Central Khalsa orphanage in Amritsar.
Udham Singh joined the Ghadar movement in the early 1920s.
Singh rose to prominence as a Ghadar activist in the US, establishing the Azad Party and broadening his network abroad.
He met Bhagat Singh in prison after being arrested in 1927 for carrying a weapon and reading seditious literature.
Udham Singh was a survivor of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.
He planned revenge against former Punjab lieutenant governor O’Dwyer and assassinated him in 1940.

This incident happened on April 13, 1919, in which under O’Dwyer’s regime British Brigadier Reginald Dyer fired at a crowd of Indians in an open space known as the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, killing several hundred people and wounding many hundreds more.

As Michael O’Dwyer (then Lt. governor of Punjab) was giving a speech at Caxton Hall, Udham Singh shot him 5 times at point-blank range with a handgun hidden in the book.
The massacre’s mastermind, Reginald Dyer, had passed away in 1927.
He was sentenced to death in the Central Criminal Court. He also went on a hunger strike while in jail. He hanged himself on July 31, 1940, in a London jail.

Singh’s one-room accommodation ancestral house in Sunam has been converted into a museum, now maintained by the archaeology department.
In 1974, Singh’s remains were exhumed in the UK and repatriated to India.
In 2016, marking Udham Singh’s birthday, then Punjab Chief Minister laid the foundation stone of a memorial for Singh, it was built on four acres of land in Sunam. The memorial was inaugurated on October 31, 2021.
Punjab and Haryana observe public holidays on the day of his execution.
On the directive of the then-chief minister of undivided Uttar Pradesh, the Udham Singh Nagar district in Uttarakhand bears the name of Udham Singh.