Mumbai, December 31
The moniker ‘Chota Pakistan’ derogatorily used to describe neighbourhoods dominated by the minority Muslim community has landed the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company (MSEDC) in a soup after several hundred power bills in the suburb of Nala Sopara outside Mumbai were found with this name.

The state-owned power distribution company has ordered an inquiry into the matter which came to light after local politicians raised a hue and cry about the Santosh Bhuvan slum cluster being tagged with the name Chota Pakistan. “This has been going on for more than a year now,” says Chhaya Patil, Congress councillor from the Vasai-Virar Municipal Corporation. “We discovered this when people came to fill the forms for their Aadhaar cards,” she adds.

After the matter came to light, the Maharashtra Minorities Commission has also got into the act. In a letter to the chief of the Maharashtra State Electricity Distribution Company, commission chairman Munaf Hakim demanded that the power body must provide details of the investigation to the body as well. “Let us know at what level did the directive to term the area as ‘Chhota Pakistan’ emanated,” the letter said.

According to information available from the MSEDC, a large number of power connections were issued to residents of the Santosh Bhuvan slum colony in the past five years as the area saw exponential growth in the number of residents. Local civic officials say many of the shanties in the area which were illegal in the past were regularized and were allotted power and water connections due to pressure from politicians.