New Delhi, Sept. 14: The Narendra Modi government has convinced a private trust in Nitish Kumar-ruled Bihar to drop plans to build a giant temple similar to the iconic Angkor Wat in Cambodia, defusing simmering diplomatic tension just ahead of a visit by Vice-President Hamid Ansari to the Southeast Asian nation.

Cambodia had asked India to stop the construction of the temple a little over 100km from Patna that Phnom Penh alleges is a "copy" of the Angkor Wat temple complex.

"We are facilitating a visit by a team of Cambodian experts to the site in Bihar, so they can examine the proposed temple and suggest the changes needed to avoid any similarity with Angkor Wat," Anil Wadhwa, secretary (east) in the foreign office, said today. "The private trust building the temple has agreed to make any changes the Cambodian team suggests."

Ansari departs tomorrow on a two-nation tour of Cambodia and Laos. In Cambodia, he will visit the Angkor Wat and the Ta Prohm temples - which India is helping restore.

He was initially also scheduled to visit Indonesia, but that last leg of his trip was chopped off because the government was originally hoping to call Parliament back to work for a few days to pass the Goods and Services Tax Bill. Ansari, as Vice-President, is chairman of the Rajya Sabha.

"We are amenable to suggestions from Cambodia," Kishor Kunal, secretary of the Mahavir Temple Trust which is building the temple, told The Telegraph. "But we too have been held up because of their concerns - and we need them to tell us what they want changed, once and for all."

The Bihar temple will be a shrine to Lord Shiva, with the world's largest shivalinga - a holy symbol of procreation - and the architectural plans are already very different from the Angkor Wat, Kunal said.

But to Cambodians, the Angkor Wat is a national symbol, and their country's biggest tourist attraction. Fears that a new temple in Bihar - larger in size than the Angkor Wat - could prove a new tourist attraction are at least in part responsible for the concern in Phnom Penh, a Cambodian official confirmed.

In June, Cambodia sent India a tersely worded protest letter - known in diplomatic jargon as a note verbale - accusing the Bihar trust of planning to use the new temple for "commercial purposes".