Sir Michael Francis O'Dwyer GCIE KCSI (28 April 1864 – 13 March 1940) was an Irish colonial officer in the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and later the Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, British India, between 1913 and 1919.

Later, he attended Mr Wren's educational crammer school in Powis Square, London, and subsequently passed the open entrance competition for the Indian Civil Service in 1882.

He was brought up in a world of hunting and snipe-shooting, of threatening letters and houghed cattle, where you were for the Government or against it, where you passed every day the results of lawlessness in the blackened walls of empty houses.

It was a world very different from the mild and ordered life of southern England... One gets the impression [of O'Dwyer when at Balliol] of a man who seldom opened a book without a purpose, whose keen hard brain acquired quickly and did not forget but had little time for subtleties.

[1] After a year and a half of travels around Europe and Russia,[4] he was selected by Lord Curzon for a significant role in the organisation of the new North-West Frontier Province and its separation from Punjab.

[1] When he assumed charge in May 1913, he was appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India[8] and was cautioned by the Viceroy Hardinge that "the Punjab was the Province about which the Government were then the most concerned; that there was much inflammable material lying about; which required very careful handling if an explosion was to be avoided".

[1][7] O'Dwyer worked closely with the military authorities and sought the aid of local rural Punjabi leaders to organise a centralised system for the recruitment of soldiers for the First World War effort in exchange for compensation, including major land grants and formal titles.

[2] The co-operation between the civil and military leaders and the leading rural Punjabis, as later described by the historian Tan Tai Yong, laid "the foundations of a militarized bureaucracy in colonial Punjab".

[13] From mid-March 1919, under O’Dwyer's orders, the CID in Amritsar kept a close surveillance of two Gandhian non-violent Indian nationalists; the Muslim barrister Saifuddin Kitchlew and the Hindu physician Dr. Satyapal.

[16] It was during O'Dwyer's tenure as Lieutenant Governor of Punjab that the Jallianwala Bagh massacre occurred in Amritsar on 13 April 1919, three days after the onset of the riots.

[15][19] A detachment of 50 British Indian Army soldiers under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer fired on a crowd in Amritsar, killing more than 1,500 people.

[25] One theory surrounding the massacre, as described by Pearay Mohan[26] and historian Raja Ram, is one of a "premeditated plan" conspired by O'Dwyer and others, including a young Punjabi youth Hans Raj.

[27][28][29] Other historians including Nick Lloyd,[28] K. L. Tuteja,[30] Anita Anand[31] and Kim A. Wagner have found that theory to lack evidence and that there was no conspiracy that Hans Raj was an "agent provocateur".

[32] O'Dwyer had contended without evidence that Dyer's violent suppression of the civilian demonstration was justified because the illegal gathering was part of a premeditated conspiracy to rebellion, which was timed supposedly to coincide with a rumoured Afghan invasion.

[1] The next year, on 24 June 1920, the opposition Labour Party Conference at Scarborough unanimously passed a resolution, which denounced the "cruel and barbarous actions" of British colonial officials in Punjab and demanded they be put on trial, the dismissal of O'Dwyer and Chelmsford and the repeal of the Rowlatt Act.

"[35] In 1922, Sir Sankaran Nair referred to O'Dwyer in his book Gandhi and Anarchy and stated that "before the reforms it was in the power of the Lieutenant-Governor, a single individual, to commit the atrocities in the Punjab which we know only too well".

[24][34][38] Heard before Mr Justice McCardie in the King's Bench Division of the High Court in London over five weeks from 30 April 1924, it was one of the longest civil law hearings in legal history.

What a greater honour could be bestowed on me than death for the sake of my motherland?He married Una Eunice, daughter of Antoine Bord of Castres, France, on 21 November 1896.