The awfulness of caste prejudice in Pakistan

To illustrate the awfulness of caste prejudice, Karamat tells a story from 1972 when he was joint secretary of the union in a big textile factory. The other joint secretary was a Christian. He constantly struggles to be accepted by the Pashtun majority workforce. He also seems to have a wife he wants to divorce but can’t as he’s Catholic. He decides to convert to Islam only to find that he is told by his Pashtun colleagues they won’t accept without being circumcised. He has himself chopped and by way of celebration is carried on the shoulders of his colleagues who now welcome him. Only to find that when he says he wants to marry a Pashto girl they say ‘No, you can’t have one of our girls. You are a ‘jeura’, you are low caste ‘. So he converts back to Christianity to be in a community that accepts him as an equal.