Port of Spain, Nov. 27: After being the toast of Washington for most of this week, it is a big come down for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh here at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, who is head of the Commonwealth, forced Singh to change his travel plans from Washington to Port of Spain yesterday to accommodate the will of Buckingham Palace.

When the Prime Minister’s state visit to the US was being planned many weeks ago, Singh was to fly out from the Andrews Air Force Base near Washington at 9.15am after a ceremonial farewell by the Americans and arrive here at 3.05pm.

But a few days before Singh was to leave New Delhi for Washington, the Prime Minister’s office (PMO) was informed that Queen Elizabeth’s British Airways Boeing 777 would be landing at Piarco International Airport here at 2.44 pm.

And the British protocol and security insisted that they did not want any aircraft landing or taking off from this airport one hour before or after the arrival of the VVIP British Airways plane.

Some 40 of a total of 53 Commonwealth heads of state arrived at Piarco International Airport one after another in quick succession yesterday, quite a feat for a relatively small airport and Port of Spain’s infrastructure, albeit upgraded for the CHOGM summit.

But no other country demanded that there should be such a big gap in VVIP flight arrivals and departures before or after their head of state or government had landed. Except the UK.

Although the Americans were informed about a change in Singh’s departure plans well before the Prime Minister left India for the US, it was still a reminder for many people of the country’s colonial baggage and history.

Twenty four hours after the Prime Minister left Washington, the US was still the talking point in the Indian delegation here.

That was because India today voted at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to censure Iran, demand that Tehran should forthwith freeze construction work at its recently newly revealed nuclear facility and adhere to UN Security Council resolutions to stop uranium enrichment.

India’s vote, its second at the IAEA against Iran, came a day after the US National Security Adviser James Jones, urged New Delhi to play a role on the Iranian nuclear issue.

“To begin with, India could be helpful in persuading Iran to accept the offer on the table for low enrichment uranium that is currently being negotiated with the IAEA,” Jones, a retired Marine Corps General, said.

By voting with the big five, the permanent members of the UN Security Council, in a reflection of India’s much-touted emerging power status, India broke with its traditional friends at multilateral fora, Brazil and South Africa of the so-called IBSA (India, Brazil, South Africa) group and with non-aligned Egypt.

Pakistan abstained from the vote on the resolution and is expected to seek an IOU from Tehran at some stage. Even the government in Kabul, which cannot survive without US military support, abstained from voting on the Washington-supported resolution.

Only Cuba, Malaysia and Venezuela voted against the censure, which was favoured by an overwhelming 25 members of the IAEA’s board of governors.

India’s hope, which has not been spelt out, is that the vote against Iran will spur the US to operationalise the Indo-US nuclear deal by reaching an agreement with New Delhi on reprocessing spent fuel.

The Prime Minister would have liked this agreement to have been sewn up and announced during his visit to Washington, but that failed to materialise.

If India had voted in support of Iran or abstained at the IAEA today, the powerful Jewish lobby in the US would have played merry hell and blocked the advancement of the nuclear deal.

The Indian delegation to the IAEA, in an “explanation of vote” said “our support for the resolution is based on the key points contained in the report” of the IAEA’s director-general (DG), Mohamed ElBaradei. It was ElBaradei’s report, which formed the basis for today’s vote.

“India has considered the role of the DG has having a vital bearing on the consideration of all issues by the board of governors,” the Indian delegation rationalised. “The conclusions he has drawn in his report are, therefore, difficult to ignore.”

Despite New Delhi’s justification for the vote, the Left parties in India and sections of the Opposition will point out that in 2006, when the UPA government voted against Iran at the IAEA for the first time, ElBaradei was neutral on the issue. But at that time, India disregarded the DG’s stand and voted with the Americans in a move that soured relations between the government and the Left parties.

At that time too, like now, the unstated truth was that India’s IAEA vote was clearly linked to the nuclear deal with Washington.