LONDON: An international conference on forced marriages has turned the focus on the Indian Diaspora after a woman from Punjab claimed that her sister set herself ablaze as she was allegedly forced into a violent marriage by their parents.

Jasvinder Sanghera, living in Derby, said her sister Robina was driven to suicide after she was told that she could not leave her husband because her family would be ashamed. When her sister killed herself, Sanghera herself was on the run from home because she had refused to marry a man her parents had lined up for her from the age of eight.

She told the European Union Forced Marriages Conference that she still held people accountable for the death of Robina.

(Jasvinder Sanghera's book Shame, is social commentary and a true story on a sad state of affairs - the mistreatment of British Asian women by their own community and parents.)