London Declaration

For other uses, see London Declaration (disambiguation).

The London Declaration was issued by the 1949 Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Conference regarding India's continued membership of the Commonwealth of Nations, an association of independent states formerly part of the British Empire, in anticipation of India's transition to a republican constitution.

The declaration was drafted jointly by V. K. Krishna Menon, a constitutional advisor to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Sir Norman Brook, the British Cabinet secretary. The declaration stated the prime ministers' agreement to India's continued membership in the organization after it became a republic. By that declaration, the Government of India had expressed its acceptance of the King as a symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and head of the Commonwealth.

The declaration dealt only with India, which was considered an exceptional case, and reaffirmed that the other members of the Commonwealth owed a common allegiance to the Crown, with an initial acceptance of the King as the head of the Commonwealth. However, it did establish a precedent that republicanism is compatible with membership in the organization. The London Declaration marked the birth of the modern Commonwealth of Nations.

This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.