Washington, May 15: Two major developments – the 9/11 terror attack and Y2K bug – brought India and the US together in a post-Cold War era, India’s envoy to the US has said.
As India was slapped with US sanctions in the aftermath of the Pokhran nuclear tests, the two countries were initiating dialogue in the years thereafter, the Indian Ambassador to the US, Navtej Singh Sarna, told a Washington audience.
Pokhran-II was the series of five nuclear bomb tests conducted by India at the Indian Army’s Pokhran Test Range in May 1998. It was the second Indian nuclear test; the first test, code-named Smiling Buddha, was conducted in May 1974. “Those were the days of Y2K and suddenly Indian computer engineers began to solve problems and actually set things right all over the United States. And we went up in respect. The diaspora had become about one and a half million and was beginning to be heard not only in companies and in hospitals but also on the Hill. So that’s where it all began,” Sarna said at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
The Y2K bug or the Millennium bug was a problem in the coding of computerised systems that was projected to create havoc in computers and computer networks around the world at the beginning of the year 2000. “Then somehow, a couple of years later the most significant thing happened, a tragic event actually, but it brought us together was 9/11 because we had known terrorism and cross-border terrorism and the evils of terrorism for the last three decades before that.
“But in a very unfortunate way terrorism was brought transatlantic and hit America at home. I think the kind of understanding and the bonding that created on that has been a very important factor in bringing the two countries together,” Sarna said. The Indian Ambassador was speaking at an event titled ‘US & India: From Estranged Democracies to Natural Allies’ organised yesterday by the CSIS to mark the 20th anniversary of the Indian nuclear tests.
