Rise in public approval of religious extremism in Pakistan

Kazmi, Syeda Ulya Ehsen

National Research University Higher School of Economics. Moscow,Russia
17 May 2022
Online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/114872/
MPRA Paper No. 114872, posted 16 Oct 2022 05:46 UTC
Syeda Ulya Ehsen Kazmi
September 2022
Abstract
This working paper aims to explain the rise in public approval of religious extremism in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. To focus on the religiopolitical parties who tend to have an extremist outlook and distinguish them from other religious parties, I present a scale for rating the religiopolitical parties on a spectrum of Moderate to Extremist by analysing their manifestos. I sing the votes casted in General Elections of 2013 and 2018, and MICS surveys during the decade of 2010 – 2019 conducted all over  Pakistan, and the Census held in 2017, I find a negative relationship between education and votes for religious extremists. On the contrary, there is a positive relation between wealth and the rise of popular support for religious extremism.  He analysis of income tax reveals that the higher the income tax filed, the greater the support for religious extremists might be. The results also establish a significant positive relationship between income inequality and support for religious extremists. Furthermore, the urban middle class is more likely to vote for religious extremist parties than the rural poor. The results, however, are not homogenous across all provinces of Pakistan. Nonetheless, they raise important questions worth exploring the factors contributing to the heterogeneity.

Keywords: Economics of Religion, Political Economy of Religion, Elections, Religious Extremism, Pakistan
JEL code: D72, N35, Z12

Introduction
Being a country with over 96% Muslim population, Pakistan has been facing religious violence for past many years. Despite the state religion and religiously dominated culture of the society, the religiopolitical parties have never been able to form a government in Pakistan at the federal level. This is feared to change in the near future due to growing religious extremism in the country. My motivation for this research subject were the results of the General Elections of 2018 when Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), an extremist religiopolitical party became the third largest political party in terms of votes received in the most populous province of Punjab. Though there have been rising cases of religion-based violence, but the public approval was unexpected and rather shocking. It was followed by concerns in media and the civil society. Therefore, I decided to investigate it further as it could have been as much of a continuation as an anomaly. Since the assassination of sitting Governor Punjab Salmaan Taseer by an on-duty Elite Force Policeman in 2011, killings in the name of anti-blasphemy vigilante justice have emerged on the forefront. The governor was assassinated because he was trying to help a poor Christian woman on death row who was wrongly accused of committing blasphemy1 and was critical of the anti-blasphemy laws which were being used as an instrument to settle scores. His assassin, Mumtaz Qadri, was made a hero by the religious extremist parties. Soon after the governor, the Federal Minister for Minority Affairs Shahbaz Bhatti was assassinated for the same reasons. With these high-profile assassinations and protests by the extremists, the government got the message and categorically denied any possibility of amending the controversial anti-blasphemy laws. This was not enough for the anti-blasphemy mob. They wanted the accused woman to be hanged and the assassin be freed. When the demands were not met, and the assassin was later hanged in 2016, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) came into being as the ultimate flag bearer of sharia law accusing the existing religious parties of lacking a spine. The Centre for Research and Security Studies have recently published a report stating that 89 people have been extra-judicially killed due to blasphemy allegations since the country’s independence in 1947 to 2021. In total, 1,504 have been accused of blasphemy. Out of which, 1,287 people have been accused of committing blasphemy just between 2011 and 2021 (Nafees, 2022) which is an alarming increase.

Blasphemy is a prominent example but not the only aspect of religious extremism. Religious extremism here refers to the use of religiously motivated violence, hate speech, incitement to violence, and support for individuals and organizations engaged in such activities. Apart from explicit use of violence, religious extremism also discourages critical thinking, discourse, and innovation which are essential for any society to grow. Moreover, the religious extremist political parties not only want to run the country a certain way, but they also want to dictate the lives and choices of citizens, especially women, as we can see in Afghanistan now. In this paper, I first introduce a 12-point scale to categorize the religiopolitical parties in Pakistan into Extremist and Non-Extremist. Then, I show that the vote share of extremist religious parties has been increasing since mid-1990s as compared to nonextremist parties based on the General Elections data from 1970 to 2018 which covers ten elections to the National Assembly of Pakistan. Their vote share was highest in 2002 elections under the military dictatorship of General Musharraf after which it declined in 2008 upon the return of democracy in Pakistan, but in the last election in 2018 they appear to be fast approaching the 2002 levels. Then, I run regressions to analyze the growing public approval of religious extremism using the lens of Economics of Religion. In the light of secularization theory, I test the relationship between education and wealth with the votes received by religious extremist parties in the last two General Elections held in 2013 and 2018 using MICS surveys data for the last decade. I found that there is a negative relationship between education and votes for religious extremists. On the contrary, there is a positive relation between wealth and the rise of public approval of religious extremism. The analysis of Income Tax Directory of 2018 further reveals that the higher the income tax filed, the greater the support for religious extremists might be. The results also establish a significant positive relationship between income
inequality and support for religious extremists. Furthermore, the urban middle class is more likely to vote for religious extremist parties than the rural poor. The results, however, are not homogenous across all provinces. Inspired by the club model of religion, I also created ethnolinguistic and religious fractionalization indices separately, for which I used the Census 2017 data. However, no significant relationship was found between support of extremism and diversity. Similarly, I used number of mosques in a district as a proxy for religiosity, but no significant relationship was found between religiosity and the support for religious extremism. This paper contributes to the niche of religious extremism within the field of Economics of Religion in a number of ways. First, it offers an Extremism Scale particularly designed in the context of political parties operating in a Muslim majority country. The existing scales, to the best of my knowledge, are focused on individuals and are being used in the Western countries. Secondly, it adds to the empirical studies on religious extremism in Global South, that too regarding a postcolonial Muslim country. Moreover, as far as I know, this is perhaps the first paper empirically analyzing general elections in Pakistan, countrywide and province-wise. Then, perhaps more importantly, its findings differentiate between religiosity and religious extremism. Further, the findings of urban middle class more likely to vote for religious extremists are both concerning and thought-provoking, and more research is required to shed light on this aspect.
The next section surveys the existing literature on the subject including literature focused on Pakistan. It lays the foundation for research problem and hypotheses that follow. After that, I describe the data, outline the methodology, and discuss the
results.