India First Foundation is a humble component of the comprehensive effort that commenced over a century ago and that has since been ceaselessly striving to recapture and reinstate our national identity. The Indian civilization stream, which has an undated and updateable beginning and an amazing continuity, which is unknown to and denied to other civilizations, was impeded for several centuries. The soul of India had always struggled and survived through the tornado of Islamic and imperial invasions, which blew off other civilizations to smithereens. 

The civilizations of Greek and Rome, of Egypt and Persia, of Mayan and North American are now part of history and have been subsumed into archives. It is only the Hindu civilization, which has survived without State protection---and in fact in spite of the State hostility----for centuries. While the Hindu civilization has shown unbelievable capacity for survival, it did not show great potential for revival and reassertion till about the middle of the 19th century. It was in the 19th century that efforts to revitalize, revive and reassert this great civilization and to restore its continuity began. What started with Ramakrishna Paramhansa saw Maharishi Dayananda, Swami Vivekananda, Maharishi Bankim Chandra, Maharishi Aurobindo, Mahatma Gandhi, Veer Savarkar, Dr.Hedgewar and Guruji Golwalkar bursting forth on the horizon to accelerate this process. The momentum that it gained thus ultimately turned a pacific race to resist and defeat the mightiest imperial power of the world and gain freedom. In the process it gave to the world yet another and a new weapon to fight the mighty--- the weapon of non- violence. Thus weapon of Satyagraha invented by Prahalada was revived and repackaged for the modern world by Mahatma Gandhi. This powerful civilization revival of Bharat set us free. The rishis and mahatmas of this ancient land laid the road to freedom, arousing its people to face and fight modern challenges.

A confluence of multi-dimensional expression of the same ideology----idea of mother worship expounded by Maharishi Bankim Chandra in his Vandemataram, the ideology of Hindu Spiritual nationalism articulated by Swami Vivekananda, the philosophy of Sanatana Dharma as the nationalism of India asserted by Maharishi Aurobindo and the ideal of Ramarajya set by Mahatma Gandhi-----became the matrix which provided the ideological basis for our independence. But the fatigue of this epic battle for freedom and the pressure of westernization and western ideas and institutions adversely impacted on the post independence leadership and distorted the ideals, values and dynamism of the freedom movement. The very ideas, ideals, philosophies and emotions, which were the drives of the independence movement, became anathema to the post independence polity, politicians, intellectuals and the establishment. The very concept of Vandemataram, the very ideology of Hindu nationalism, the very philosophy of Sanatana Dharma, the very goal of Ramrajya came to be regarded as narrow and sectarian and even communal and dangerous, leading this ancient nation to senseless drift. This drift resulted in total misdirection of the national mind and split the nation into majority and minority, this caste and that caste, rich and poor. Consequently, divisive politics, ever-splitting political parties and pseudo-secular political agenda began to shape vote banks on the basis of such contrived splits in the Indian society. The vote banks became the determinant of the content of the political and intellectual discourse in this country. In the process pseudo secularism emerged as the most powerful catalyst in this process of derailing the ideals of the freedom movement and therefore as the single greatest ideological threat to Indian Identity.

The corrective, over due, did come, but fairly late. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Ayodhya movement evolved as the most decisive correction to this senseless national drift. It de-freezed the national mind. It opened up subjects like the meaning and content of communalism and secularism of nationalism and of national identity, which were closed for debate, for discussion and dialogue. It changed the political map of India and reestablished the national journey, which was disrupted by the post independence pseudo-political drift. But it only corrected the direction and began a dialogue. It was a beginning, but, a decisive one. Not a completed agenda as yet. National developments through the Ramjanmabhumi movement since about the middle of 1980s and the global developments since the collapse of the Berlin Wall have coalesced and harmonized now into a battle against intolerance and terrorism at the national level and at the global level after the terror struck the WTC. The Indian experience with intolerance and religious terrorism is now being felt and shared at the global level. These developments have opened up an endless space for thought, dissemination of information and ideas, for debates and dialogue to give nationalist direction to India and an Indian lead to the world, long overdue. As Swami Vivekananda said, it is given to the Hindus by Destiny to discover the idea of universal validity of all faiths and ways of life and share it with the rest of the world. This inclusive idea, which validates all Gods, faiths, peoples and way of life, is the ultimate destination of the journey of humanity and the final guarantee for global and national peace. In this largely inter-net-knitted world no single nation can have peace, which the others in the world does not share. This peace is not based on external equality but related to internal equanimity in humanity. Those thought streams which believe in and assert their exclusive wisdom and seek to shape the world on the limited canvas of their received wisdom have caused havoc for over a millennium and wiped out thousands of ancient traditions including the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Native American, Mayan and other ancient cultures. The recent developments at the global level has thrown up a challenge to Hindu race to convince others about the futility and danger of insisting on their monopoly in the domain of wisdom and to come to terms with the inevitable truth that just as the universe is diverse, the world too will be diverse and so too will be the ideas, faiths, and ways of life of humanity. No single God, faith, ideas and way of life would suffice the diverse needs of humanity. The way to peace and joy is for all to understand that diversity is the rule of nature, that is, God -and no faith, idea or people can repeal this immutable law. This idea validates every God, every book, every faith and every way of life. It does not invalidate, repudiate or repeal any. It recognises all experiences. It does not believe in experimenting, even without force, even by persuasion, one’s experience on another. This is the Indian experience, view, finding and message to all particularly to the west and to all semitic faiths and institutions each of which claim exclusive validity and monopoly knowledge of the ultimate truth. If the world is not to slip into a future that guarantees mutual extermination based on exclusivist ideas, the Hindu race must rise up to proclaim as valid all faiths. But it cannot do it alone. It must co-opt all those, to which ever faith or place they belong to, who believe into the diversity of faiths and disagree on the monopoly of wisdom, form a mighty global alliance to proclaim this idea of validity of all truths. In fact even wars may have to be waged by a coalition to enforce the sharing of the belief that all beliefs are sacred by those who believe that only their beliefs are sacred and others' false. Only a voluntary or enforced realization that all faiths are sacred will guarantee the safety and security of all faithful of all faiths. Here all faiths are sacred, so are all books, all prophets and all people. There is only one unifying principle and that is there is no single valid faith and the only valid faith is that all faiths are valid. This most ancient nation Bharat, the cradle of global civilizations, is the most ideal vehicle for the mission of articulating this universal unity with diversity of faiths. It is in this contest and with this background and purpose some striving minds have come together to launch one more effort, through the India First Foundation, to intensify the process of national rejuvenation and reassertion in India and to make one more effective contribution to the evolving global response to meeting the challenges of the future. The fundamental principle of this response will be based on the age-old tradition of India, which regards, 'the world as one family', the universe as an indivisible whole and all belief systems as sacred. But these principles cannot be lived by any particular nation or religion in isolation ---- as those who do not subscribe to this will not allow it to happen. It has to be a shared value to be lived by all for that it has to be shared with all, with every nation and every belief system in the world, so that, it is shared even by those who are unfamiliar to those values. The India First Foundation is thus a humble soldier in the great effort to contribute to the goal of empowering India as a nation first, then and eventually to become a global vehicle to deliver the global message it is destined to deliver.