Mahesh Raut

Mahesh Sitaram Raut (born 1 July 1987) is an Indian land-rights and Adivasi rights activist from Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra. A graduate of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and a former Prime Minister's Rural Development Fellow, Raut has spent over a decade organising Gram Sabhas in Gadchiroli to assert rights under the Forest Rights Act and the Panchayats (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act (PESA), helping communities take direct control of forest produce trade away from middlemen and supporting Adivasi candidates in local body elections against a backdrop of large-scale mining projects in the region. He is also the youngest of the accused in the Bhima Koregaon–Elgar Parishad case, arrested on 6 June 2018 and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) over alleged links to the banned CPI (Maoist). As of 2026, he remains an undertrial, having spent most of the period since 2018 in Taloja Central Jail amid a prolonged, unresolved bail process, during which he has also written published first-person accounts of prison conditions.

Early life and education Raut was born on 1 July 1987 in Lakhapur village, Chandrapur district, in Maharashtra's Vidarbha region; he spent most of his childhood and student life in neighbouring Gadchiroli district with his maternal grandparents childhood. His father worked as a police patil, a village-level quasi-judicial officer. He completed his early schooling at Navodaya Vidyalaya, Gadchiroli, moved to Nagpur for further studies, and briefly worked as a primary school teacher in Kendriya Vidyalaya in OF Chanda, Bhadravati and Vasco, Goa. He chose to continue working in the region after the fellowship ended rather than pursue conventional employment.

His work centred on:

Forest and land rights and the "tendu rebellion": mobilising Gram Sabhas to secure community forest rights titles under the Forest Rights Act and assert self-governance rights under the PESA Act. He is credited with helping tribal communities gain direct control over the harvesting and marketing of forest produce such as tendu leaves and bamboo, previously controlled by the forest department and contractors, including campaigning for tendu-leaf collection tenders to be awarded directly to Adivasi Gram Sabhas rather than through middlemen. Mining opposition: educating Gram Sabhas that their free, prior consent was legally required before any mining lease could be granted on their land, and organising democratic resistance against mining projects such as the Surjagarh mining project near Thakurdev hill in Etapalli, a site considered sacred by local Madia Gond Adivasis. Electoral organising: he supported local Adivasi candidates contesting Zila Parishad and Panchayat Samiti elections on explicitly anti-mining, anti-displacement platforms. In local body polls in 2017, several Gram Sabha-backed candidates he had worked alongside — including Lalsu Soma Nagoti and Sainu Gota, who won Zila Parishad seats from Bhamragad and Gattapad respectively, and Sukhram Mandavi and Pramila Juru Kudiyami, who won Panchayat Samiti seats — gave Gram Sabhas a three-fourths majority on the Bhamragad Panchayat Samiti, a result described in Indian media as tribal communities' own answer to the disenfranchisement satirised in the Bollywood film Newton. Raut himself remarked on the significance of Kudiyami's win, noting that "hardly any woman from this marginalised community gets a chance to become a public representative."

Around 80 former PMRDF fellows, along with former Union Rural Development Minister, publicly defended Raut after his 2018 arrest, describing him as one of the best-performing fellows to have served in a conflict-affected district. She noted that a media report alleging he had travelled to Brazil to "mobilise" people against the Indian government in fact referred to his attendance at an international political education programme at the Escola Nacional Florestan Fernandes.

Arrest On 6 June 2018, Raut was arrested in Nagpur along with fellow activists Surendra Gadling and Shoma Sen, in a coordinated nationwide operation that also saw Sudhir Dhawale arrested in Mumbai and Rona Wilson in Delhi. He was charged under the UAPA. The prosecution's case against Raut rests on a letter allegedly recovered from co-accused Rona Wilson's computer, in which the National Investigation Agency (NIA) claims a payment of 5 lakh rupees was made by a person referred to as "Mahesh" to help fund the Elgar Parishad event. Raut's family and colleagues have disputed the charges, stating that after his arrest, police reportedly questioned him only about mining projects in Gadchiroli and not about Bhima Koregaon. The accused were subsequently moved to Mumbai's Arthur Road Jail before being lodged at Taloja Central Jail. and six weeks from 16 September 2025 (later extended to 26 November 2025) on medical grounds, after he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis requiring specialised treatment. After that interim bail lapsed, a Special NIA Court in January 2026 rejected a plea for him to travel to Kerala for further Ayurvedic treatment, citing bail conditions confining him to the Bombay High Court's jurisdiction; Raut challenged that rejection before the High Court in July 2026, a plea pending at the time of writing.

UN human rights experts expressed concern in October 2018 that the charges against Raut and fellow accused were being used to silence human rights defenders working on Dalit, indigenous and tribal rights, and approximately 300 Gram Sabhas in Gadchiroli passed resolutions in support of Raut following his arrest, with villagers highlighting his work on forest rights.

Health in custody Raut suffered from acute ulcerative colitis around the time of his arrest and subsequently in custody. In the same account, he wrote that he had witnessed a fellow prisoner die of an untreated heart attack after guards failed to secure timely medical attention, and drew a comparison with the death in custody of his co-accused Stan Swamy. "Notes From Inside Taloja Prison" (Outlook, June 2025) is a further first-person piece on prison life written during his incarceration. "A Broken Prison System Is in Dire Need of Critical Care" (Outlook, 22 January 2026) is a first-person account, written while on interim medical bail, describing the lack of medical infrastructure, staff and diagnostic care in Indian prisons, drawing on his own diagnosis and his experience witnessing another prisoner's death, and situating prison healthcare neglect within broader patterns of disadvantage faced by marginalised undertrials.

Reception Raut's grassroots work has been credited in Indian media with concrete gains for Gadchiroli's Adivasi communities, including local body election wins by Gram Sabha-backed candidates and a shift of tendu-leaf revenue away from middlemen and toward village-level control. The 2024 Wire essay by Mohan and Dwivedi frames his imprisonment within a broader argument about caste and state power in India. A 2018 personal essay by his college friend, writer Sohini Shoaib, argued against the "urban Maoist" characterisation used by police and some media, instead describing him as a well-regarded, non-violent community organiser. Legal commentary from CJP and LawBeat has focused on the anomaly of his case: the Bombay High Court found insufficient evidence against him and granted bail in 2023, yet procedural stays kept him incarcerated for roughly two more years, a pattern described as illustrative of broader concerns about UAPA bail jurisprudence.