The article focuses on specific features of the rhetoric and practice of Indian nonviolent protest movements. India gave the world a unique example: being the country of glaring social contrasts and demonstrating highest levels of polarity of population, variety of ethnic and confessional characteristics and social and economic structures (from archaic to post-industrial social groups), Indian society managed to create universal synthetic forms of public sentiments’ expression of mass frustration including peace march of protest, free-will imprisonment and fasting. Gandhian ideas and practices, immanent to Indian philosophical traditions, are actual in socio-political sphere of today. Gandhian heritage form the essence and the core of contemporary Indian political and social dispute, around which various forces of Indian society are grouping. Indian philosophical traditions, based on principles of intellectual heterodoxy, are always associated with peace and wisdom. Satyagraha (sanskr. – devotion to truth) and ahimsa (nonharming or nonviolence) remain symbolic terms immanent to traditional philosophical systems of India and bear the significance of “cultural codes” of Indian civilazation. India gave bright examples of political thinking and created a democratic political system, based on principles of common consent, unity and continuity of policy, demonstrating evolutionary type of development based on concencus despite existing contradictions between political parties, particular leaders and social tensions, immanent to every multiethnic and multi-confessional society and necessary in constructing civil society based on certain national identity.