I bet you a pound to a penny she is a second polygamous wife. Cultural issues my a*se. He’s got a harem run with a rod of iron by his mother in true Sultan fashion. 

Beautifully said.

There is a recurrent stereotype in South Asian culture of the domineering mother-in-law being cruel to the wife of her son. It reflects a reality of a matriarchy sometimes as ruthless as an overbearing patriarchal dictator. It persists most regularly amongst women who are vulnerable because they have been arranged into a marriage from abroad and so are at the complete mercy of the family they have married into. They are deliberately stunted in their development and independance and have no family here to help them to extricate themselves. Note that one of the women was made to work up to 15 hours a day at a sewing machine. Effectively, she was enslaved.

'Cultural issues' my arse indeed. Even most Muslims won't treat their daughters-in-law in such an extreme way. The sooner this cant, this repulsive doublspeak is discarded the sooner vulnerable women can be freed from this kind of oppressive family structure. And it is this polygamous undertow is what makes this most pernicious though. The second wife has even less hope than the first, because under British law she doesn't even have the protection or rights that a legal spouse has, and she has been deliberately set there to deprive her of these rights.

The shariaists will say this is the reason sharia codes should be incorporated, to protect those vulnerable. Every sane person should respond that we protect them by cracking down on polygamous practise -- by prosecution for bigamy if nessecary.