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As far as I know there is currently no legal ban on widow remarriage in India at the moment. This is not a particularly new development either - the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act 1856 is the early piece of legislation that granted widows the legal ability to remarry, and more current laws such as the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 do not prevent widows from remarrying (rather, it simply provides that a marriage may be solemnised between any two Hindus as long as neither party has a spouse living at the time of the marriage). The article you linked is talking more about the social stigma that gets attached to widows in very staunchly conservative parts of the country than anything else.
If we were to talk about the current Indian laws, I think there's actually an argument that the laws are very favourable to women in quite a few ways, especially considering the fact that preferential treatment of women is explicitly allowed in the equality provisions of the Indian constitution. In a section dictating that the State shall not discriminate based on demography, it's followed up with a bunch of caveats, including "(3) Nothing in this article shall prevent the State from making any special provision for women and children."
Unless you do a proper comparison as to who's "doing worse", I don't quite see how this has been proven. The article does speak about the plight of shunned Hindu widows, but it does not provide any such comparison, nor does it attempt to.
This is a common view I see expressed - that the Western world is unique in its treatment of women, even historically - and I am a bit doubtful about it. I've noticed that women are simply assumed to be worse off in the third world with no real substantiation - this is not to say that everything is great for women in these societies, but there's little acknowledgement of the corresponding male issues that exist in them.
In countries such as Afghanistan, there is a practice such as bacha bazi, which translates as 'boy play'. It is on the surface a harmless form of entertainment - young boys dancing for the entertainment of their elders. The boys are trained as dancers, dressed as girls and made to perform to groups of men. Then the boys are taken to hotel rooms where they can be sexually abused. And despite the US military knowing that many of their Afghan allies were involved in the practice of bacha bazi, they continued providing aid to these units.
Then there's things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. People know them for kidnapping the Chibok girls. What people don't know is that Boko Haram went from village to village kidnapping thousands of boys. They not only kidnapped boys, but they killed them too (in many of their attacks, they seem to have specifically targeted men and boys and exempted the women and girls). Here are some links about that. Source 1, source 2, source 3, source 4.
A report by Oxfam in August 2016 noted that thousands of men and boys were killed by the terrorist group Boko Haram in north-eastern Nigeria. In an Oxfam protection survey with communities affected by violence, people reported 41% more killings of men and boys by Boko Haram than of women and girls; and the number is even higher among adults, with 77% more men killed than women.
What the mainstream goes nuts over, though, is the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls. This despite the fact that Boko Haram were not initially intending to kidnap the girls - the girls were not even the actual target of the raid, and yet these girls being kidnapped was the event that galvanised the international community to start paying attention, as well as offering equipment, intelligence, resources and manpower to "bring back the girls" and deal with Boko Haram.
So let's just say I always regard it as a bit dubious whenever the spectre of misogyny and unique female hardship in third-world countries is raised due to the selectivity of the attention applied to the third world. This is a very good counter-narrative article on women in the third world and media bias (actually, it's a chapter in a book by Tim Goldich, published as an article), which sums up my views on this pretty well:
"You can go to a brutal place, catalogue only the brutality toward women, and on that basis conclude that women are the victims, but if you don’t research conditions for men, if you don’t compare the female victimization against male victimization, your conclusion is logically bankrupt."
Don't get me wrong: I am not trying to argue who has it worse or better. I'm trying to explain why as a result of all of this, I've come to see most takes on gender relations in the third world as the presentation of half-truths at best.
Social stigma is a very potent force, no matter what legislation may say. Talking about how polygyny affects and affected men neglects how it affects and affected women, too. We can't disentangle it by saying "X has it worse, Y has it worse"; for every man who can't marry the woman he wants, there is a woman being married off as a second or third wife who doesn't want it either (first or primary or higher-ranking wives have traditionally not been very kind to subsequent wives or concubines).
The Bachi Bazi boys and the likes are disgraces. It's not much consolation to say that women have been forced into similar roles, and I think you do have to look at "why do some cultures tolerate this, and others don't"? You are correct to say that unique female hardship in third-world countries is not unique and is more complicated than "Western culture is more advanced", but there are differences.
However, the main point is that feminism took the real disadvantages and pointed them out, but is now stuck in the mode of "it is all the fault of men". Men are disadvantaged too, but it may be that male disadvantage and female disadvantage do not resemble each other. So we're trying to compare apples and oranges, and measure it in how many bananas that means.
Sure (though I suspect the stigma heavily depends on where in India you are). I'm just clarifying some things and also stating that there's no actual proper analysis which is made that allows us to appropriately come to a conclusion that women are faring worse. Usually, people look at things that affect women (or that they think affect women), create narratives of female oppression in their mind and assume there is no "other side" of things, when often, there is.
Legally, women in India actually have a huge amount of protections and privileges most people elsewhere never hear about. There's way too many to easily list here, but as previously noted, article 15(3) of the Indian constitution explicitly allows for preferential treatment of women. The constitution (article 243D and 243T) surprisingly also provides for very generous female quotas in village councils (panchayats) and municipalities, but there are other, more egregious things in the law I'll detail below.
The Indian penal code (IPC) contains specific offences that uniquely protect women.
IPC section 354 contains the offence "Assault or criminal force to woman with intent to outrage her modesty" which is female specific and carries a more severe sentencing of up to 5 years. Section 354A on sexual harassment is also gendered. Section 354B "Assault or use of criminal force to woman with intent to disrobe" and 354C "Voyeurism" are both strictly male-on-female crimes and carry sentencing of up to 7 years. Section 354D "Stalking" is also male-on-female, and carries a maximum of 3 to 5 years depending on whether it is a first or second conviction. In comparison, the penalties for the other gender neutral offences under the section "Of Criminal Force and Assault" carry sentences of up to only 2 years at most.
IPC section 375 clearly defines rape as only male-on-female, and any attempts to make the definition of rape gender neutral were fiercely protested against by Indian feminists. The IPC does have a law against unnatural offences (Section 377) which may cover male-on-male offences, but it doesn't seem like it would cover the case of a woman forcing "natural" PIV sex on a man.
IPC section 493 has an offence titled "Cohabitation caused by a man deceitfully inducing a belief of lawful marriage" which is also gender-specific - it can by definition only be male-on-female.
IPC section 498A has an offence titled "Husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty" which carries a sentence of up to three years and a fine. 498A is pretty infamous in India for being misused by women, where many of them used it to file false accusations so that they could settle scores. In line with this, there is also an additional law called "Protection Of Women From Domestic Violence Act 2005" which is again gender specific.
IPC section 509 has an offence titled "Word, gesture or act intended to insult the modesty of a woman" which sets out punishments for anyone who, intending to insult a woman's modesty, "utters any words, makes any sound or gesture, or exhibits any object, intending that such word or sound shall be heard, or that such gesture or object shall be seen, by such woman, or intrudes upon the privacy of such woman". There are other corresponding gender-specific acts relating to this topic such as the "Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act".
Then there's the Code of Criminal Procedure, or Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC), which has more. CrPC section 46 states that "Provided that where a woman is to be arrested, unless the circumstances indicate to the contrary, her submission to custody on an oral intimation of arrest shall be presumed and, unless the circumstances otherwise require or unless the police officer is a female, the police officer shall not touch the person of the woman for making her arrest". Even more bizarrely, officers are instructed not to arrest women after sunset and before sunrise (except in exceptional circumstances with prior permission from a Judicial Magistrate).
As to male social issues, I'd note that India itself has its own version of bacha bazi, known as "launda dancers". Again, these are young boys who dress as women and dance, and "A range of physical and sexual abuse towards launda dancers has been documented during wedding processions. These include: being bitten, burned with cigarettes, assaulted and gang raped at knifepoint, with even reports of deaths for protesting against such abuses."
There are studies that seem to indicate that boys in India are subjected to more childhood sexual abuse than girls, but boys are hardly ever thought of as victims in the mainstream.
Then there's also the boys and young men who are abducted, castrated and forced into being "hijras". Point of this entire thing is, if you don't go looking into things yourself, you're going to come out with a bit of a skewed view as to what third world countries as well as traditional, historical societies are actually like.
I'm unsure how I specifically neglected this and how else I was supposed to approach it, especially considering that my comment partially functioned as a rebuttal of the conceptualisation of polygyny as being oppressive towards women - I argued that it was a fundamentally incomplete view because it ignores how polygyny affects men. In my opinion, the majority of people have a fundamentally broken view of polygyny as representing male privilege when I think it does not. My statement that "People are ignoring half the picture" isn't me ignoring half the picture.
I'll also restate that it's probably a hasty assumption that polygyny must represent women being coerced since there is ample evidence that polygyny can be driven by female choice. As I stated elsewhere:
"It's commonly posited that polygyny can definitely be chosen by women when a given female’s position is enhanced by becoming the second mate of a resource-rich and already paired male, rather than the sole mate of a resource-poor unpaired male."
"In their paper "Why Monogamy?" Kanazawa and Still propose a female power theory of marriage practices, hypothesising that polygyny arises when women have more power in a society with high inequalities of wealth among men. Using data obtained from political science and sociology indexes, they demonstrated that societies with more resource inequality among men were more polygynous. Additionally, they found that, controlling for economic development and sex ratio, when there is greater resource equality among men, societies with more female power and choice have more monogamy; but when there are greater resource inequalities, higher levels of female power are accompanied by higher levels of polygyny. Accordingly, the incidence of polygyny may indicate female choice rather than male choice. "These findings are consistent with our prediction that women choose to marry polygynously or monogamously according to which choice benefits them or their offspring"."
Feminists created a false perception of how gender relations operate with their myopic focus on women. If someone is essentially going around treating massively important social issues and parts of the social system as if they're not even there, it can hardly be argued that their view is in any way balanced.
Well, if anything that's a reason why one should find statements about women's oppression dubious at best! Any statement that women have been uniquely oppressed and represent a sort of gender "underclass" requires one to have made such a comparison, which is probably quite difficult if not impossible to do without making a litany of very questionable value judgements. More than that, as you also note it's presented as oppression by men without much evidence being offered up to support the idea that the offending custom actually originated from men in the first place.
And the other big reason is that most of the people making these statements often fundamentally just don't consider male issues to be a salient consideration at all, which is another huge error in their thinking.
EDIT: trimmed some parts, made an amendment
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