This study focuses on a series of events related to the sudden disappearance of bloggers in Pakistan on 7 January 2017. Following the incident, the broadcast media
reported that the bloggers were sharing blasphemous content and were involved
in anti-state activities. This revelation triggered online conversations that questioned their sympathizers’ patriotism and loyalty to Islam. The study locates how
this led to the emergence of several hashtag-led publics on Twitter. While focusing
two hashtags that polarized the publics on the issue, the study utilizes discourse
analysis to evaluate the discourses generated by the conservative and the liberal
publics on patriotism and national identity. This study finds that while conflating
national identity with Islam, the conservative discourse constitutes angry, threatlike closed statements that allowed no room for disagreement. Liberal publics, on
the other hand, use strategic speaking to create anti-state discourse on patriotism.
Despite the heated exchange between the two publics, I argue that on this occasion
(event-led), Twitter offered the opportunity for initiating counter-narratives that
refuse to translate patriotism in the idiom of religion. I see this as an occasional,episodic, yet unprecedented form of public sphering in Pakistani contex