DECCAN KHALSA DIWAN, a philanthropic organization of the Sikhs, now nonexistent, was formed in Bombay on the eve of Indian Independence (August 1947), with Partap Singh as president and Hari Singh Shergill as general secretary. The DIwan`s main object was to provide help for the rehabilitation of persons uprooted from their homes in the north in the wake of inter communal rioting. It also offered its services to protect the old Sikh residents of Nanded in Hyderabad state, who were numerically a very small group and who felt apprehensive about the safety of their historic shrine in the town and of their own lives in the deteriorating law and order situation in the state, then held to ransom by the fanatical Qasim Rizvi.
