Politicizing Prophethood: Techniques of Far-Right Encroachment on Civil Society in Pakistan

How do far-right parties expand and legitimize their ideas within the civil society? Research on far-right parties has focussed on their electoral successes and increasing normalization of their exclusive ideologies within formal politics. However far-right parties often function as hybrids combining electoral strategies with social movement activism. This paper draws attention to movement characteristics of far-right politics through the case of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP)– an anti-blasphemy political party in Pakistan– a country where elections co-exist with military authoritarianism and constrained civil liberties. Based on longitudinal ethnography of the party, and drawing from social movement literature, the paper identifies three techniques through which TLP expands its influence within the civil society: Reframing Narratives where the party grounds its narratives in familiar and legitimate sources but reframes them to foster hate against specific social groups; Bridging and Bonding networks, where the party recruits grass roots activists and co-opts brokers who disseminate its narratives across different organizational and social media networks; and Practicing Contention, where the party symbolically appropriates existing cultural objects and practices to engage in both routine and episodic forms of contention. Taken together these three mechanisms which I call ‘Techniques of civil society encroachment’ not only expand the party’s exclusionary, particularist, and repressive norms but also lead to erosion of inclusionary, universalist, solidaric norms from the civil society. The paper concludes with a discussion of contextual factors which facilitate far-right encroachment of civil society in the context of Pakistan’s religious nationalist and politically hybrid regime.