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By Himanshu Bhatt. IT IS said that people living on an island tend to possess a distinct and highly parochial identity of their own, shaped by a subtle sense of how they are geo-graphically removed from the rest of the world. One may notice this trait, which can be forgiven for veering towards the vain, when interacting with native islanders in the region such as those from Penang, Bali, Phuket and even Langkawi. In this regard, the inhabitants of Balik Pulau, a secluded district on the south-western side of Penang island, have reason to be even more cloistered and smug about their identity. Separated from the rest of civilisation by a huge range of green hills, the sprawling area opens up to the visitor a very different side of Penang – rural, lush, idyllic and dotted by villages, fruit farms, forests and agricultural estates, where durians, clove and nutmeg are said to grow as nowhere else on the planet.
There are no malls here, no hotels, no high-rise buildings and certainly no pubs or discos. For some two hundred years now, folk in Balik Pulau, which literally means the “other side of the island”, have lived with the notion that this pastoral peace, this sanctuary is theirs forever. Not anymore. A series of modern development projects have suddenly sprung up over vast tracts of Balik Pulau where orchards and plantations existed just a few years ago. With the more well-known north-eastern part of Penang becoming increasingly congested and overflowing with buildings and people, there has been a sudden trend for populations to spill over to this emptier part of the island. The situation has become so dire that the MP for Balik Pulau, Yusmadi Yusoff, has called for a blanket halt on all development projects in his once rustic constituency. Many traditional residents – Malays, Chinese and some Indians – are being uprooted in their own homeland, he insists, as plots they have lived on for generations are bought over by unfamiliar, “foreign” developers. The prospect of a second Penang Bridge, which connects to the mainland, to open by 2014, does not help, for it is expected to jack up land prices and intensify demand for new construction in Balik Pulau as well as other southern areas of the island. On a recent tour, Yusmadi showed journalists scabs of projects – bungalows, terraces and semi-detached houses – that appear to have been so rudely thrust into the district, seeming alien to the local landscape and sensibility. The most stinging part of this scenario may well be that these new properties are being bought and resided in mainly by outsiders. “Currently, the new housing projects carried out in Balik Pulau are not affordable to residents here,” Yusmadi lamented. “So in what direction are these development projects headed? Are they supposed to benefit local people or just outsiders?” He has even asked the state authorities to approve projects only after consultation with local village committees in order to safeguard the aspirations and interests of the more original communities here. The stance is very much reflective of the simmering anger among the grassroots here. For Balik Pulau folk are extremely guarded about their communities. Adding to this whole affair is an inevitable political layer, where Yusmadi who is from PKR, is expected to face a dogged challenge from Umno as it works to wrest back the parliamentary seat in the next general election. One may remember the hue and cry Umno made earlier this year over some oversights in historical detail in a children’s educational publication on Balik Pulau. This leaves the state government in a bind. In a laissez-faire economy, it cannot arbitrarily stop projects that have been approved unless they are found to violate set technical conditions. In fact, the state itself is behind several land acquisition efforts here as it tries to implement its new plan for an education hub, to be filled by private universities and schools, in Balik Pulau. The government’s assurance that it would ensure developers provide adequate new low-cost and low-medium cost houses does not assuage the genuine fears of marginalisation and erosion of indigenous socio-cultural identity. The Balik Pulau scenario offers a remarkable case study of how a government is called upon to manage the urban sprawl phenomenon. For the dilemma here highlights a crucial question of whether development should fester on its own selfish accord, motivated by profit and the conven-ience of outsiders who have hardly lived in a locale before, or if it must reckon with the deeper interests of original settlers who have cared for the land which they call home, from long before. ** Republished with permission. This article first appeared in the July 29, 2011 issue of theSun. Himanshu is theSun’s Penang bureau chief.
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