Third candidate for Commonwealth top job

India's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Kamalesh Sharma, is New Delhi's official candidate for the post of Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, the Indian government said.

This brings the number of declared candidates for this post so far to three: Mr Sharma, Mohan Kaul, the director-general of the Commonwealth Business Council (who is also Indian), and Foreign Minister Michael Frendo, who was nominated by the Maltese government in April and who was the first candidate to run for this top job.

Mr Sharma, 67, was previously India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York and the UN Secretary-General's special envoy to East Timor. The election of the Commonwealth Secretary-General will take place at the next Commonwealth summit (CHOGM) in Kampala, Uganda, in November and the successful candidate will take office the following April.

The Secretary-General is the chief executive of the Commonwealth Secretariat, which is the main inter-governmental agency of the Commonwealth. He or she is chosen by the heads of state and of government for no more than two four-year terms. Britain's Queen Elizabeth II is the symbolic head of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth, formed in 1949, consists of 53 independent sovereign states, all of which are former colonies of the United Kingdom, except for Mozambique and the UK itself.

The Commonwealth is primarily an organisation in which countries with diverse economic backgrounds have an opportunity for close and equal interaction. The primary activities of the Commonwealth are designed to create an atmosphere of economic cooperation between member nations, as well as the promotion of democracy, human rights and good governance within member states.