It brings forcefully home the realization that we are indeed one human family: We inhabit the same planet Earth and artificially constructed enmity and rivalry based on the competitive and exclusionary concept of national security can be irrelevant to securing citizens against the major real threats to their security.

One hopes the scale of the shared tragedy will have a cathartic and unifying effect on domestic conflicts, for example in Aceh Province and between the Tamil Tigers and the government in Sri Lanka. The spontaneous and warm generosity of the Thai common people who, even in the midst of tragedies within their own communities, offered many kind gestures of help and support to the foreigners vacationing on their beaches has been heart-warming.

The event may also help to reorient Indian public and official attention eastward. Washington has sensibly decided to coordinate aid, relief and rescue efforts with the three regional countries that have sizable material capacity to do so: Australia, India and Japan.

World War II reminded Indians of the importance of sea lanes of communication around the approaches to the subcontinent. It was the ability to rule the waves which brought Britain to India as the colonizing power. Yet independent India is yet to wake up fully to the strategic importance of the waterways around it.

The Indian Ocean covers about a fifth of the world's ocean area, with almost 50 countries around its littoral and immediate hinterland. With links to both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, it is of vital commercial, political and strategic importance to India. The peninsular nature of India's shoreline exposes it to potential seaborne threats from the east, west and south. Then there are the island territories: the Andaman and Nicobar chain to the east and the Lakshadweep group to the west.

Sea power remains a neglected dimension in Indian defense calculations, with its chief security preoccupations being the land borders with Pakistan and China. Relations between India and Southeast Asian countries waned from the 1960s to the 1980s for many reasons. India's pretensions to continental and world leadership were severely dented by the military debacle at the hands of China in 1962. While pride was restored after the Bangladesh War of 1971, India's close military links with the Soviet Union caused persistent anxieties among Southeast Asian countries.

The oil shocks of the 1970s underlined the need for India to seek assured deliveries of oil at concessionary prices. New Delhi was also keen to capture a share of the economic boom in the oil-rich Middle Eastern states by exporting low-wage unskilled and semiskilled labor.

The 1970s signaled a reentry of China as a respected member of the regional and international community. Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations accorded higher priority in their foreign policies to relations with China than India. Their suspicions of Indian nonalignment being unduly accommodative toward Soviet interests were reinforced in the 1980s by New Delhi's relatively softer line on the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1988, followed by the Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia in 1989, removed these political irritants from India-ASEAN relations. The collapse of the Soviet Union accelerated the trend toward evaluating Indian policy on its own merits rather than through the distorting prism of the Cold War.

There was a greater willingness in ASEAN capitals to accept the defensive explanations to India's force modernization of the 1980s. India also moderated its relations with China and upgraded Southeast Asia in the hierarchy of its foreign political and economic relations. Southeast Asian countries in turn became relatively more wary of China in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the possibility of U.S. military retrenchment from the Asia-Pacific region. By the end of the 1980s India was starting to reorient its policy from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. The oil glut of the 1980s and the consequent fall in world oil prices, increased domestic oil production by India, the belief that courtship of the Middle Eastern states had not brought commensurate political rewards, and the war of attrition between Iran and Iraq, two of India's more important economic partners in the region combined to diminish the relative significance of the Middle East.

Economic success in the Asia-Pacific region turned Indian attention in that direction instead. Southeast Asia increased in importance both as a supplier of goods to India and as an alternative market for Indian goods. Trade with ASEAN has grown in volume, value and as a proportion of India's total world trade.

ASEAN leaders hope for the rapid development and liberalization of China and India with a measure of equivalence, provided that India removes the dead weight of red tape and regulation, and provided too that corruption is tamed in both countries. Certainly robust growth in both these mega-markets has provided ballast for regional economies through the financial tempests of the last few years.

India has also joined China in signing peace and friendship treaties with ASEAN countries, and exploring the option of free-trade agreements with them. Japan too is doing the same.

The distinctive geography of southern and southeast Asia gives India a major commercial and strategic location astride the sea lanes of communication between the Middle East and East Asia. The geographical unity has been psychologically reinforced with the force of the tsunami that spread so speedily and powerfully the length and breadth of the Indian Ocean, all the way across to the east coast of Africa. When we include the thousands of Europeans vacationing in the pleasure beaches during this festive season, we realize just how many different continents are united in this tragedy.

The opportunity is there for all four of the United States, Australia, Japan and India to assume a leadership role based on human solidarity, put their assets at the service of ravaged humanity along the rim of fire, and cooperate in installing a tsunami warning system around the Indian Ocean. The tragedy is proof, if any were still needed, that development and security are two sides of the same coin. It offers a rare chance too for smaller nations to think of large and powerful neighbors as helpful friends and not threatening bullies in the neighborhood.

Thakur is senior vice rector of United Nations University in Tokyo. These are his personal views.