On December 8, 2018, five election commissioners sat as judges in an appeals hearing at Bangladesh’s Election Commission. For much of the day, the proceedings followed rather an uncomplicated pattern. One commissioner would announce a decision on a candidate’s appeal, and the other four would go along.
Mahbub Talukdar did something unusual. He waited.
He had not delivered a ruling on any of the appeals that morning. He was holding himself back for one case…that of Khaleda Zia, the former prime minister and leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party.
When her appeal came up, it lasted only minutes. But it captured something larger about Mahbub Talukdar’s five years on the Election Commission: his willingness to use the limited authority of his office to challenge an institution in which he was increasingly isolated.
I was there that day.
Khaleda Zia had sought to contest three constituencies in the 2018 election — Bogura-6, Bogura-7 and Feni-1. Her nomination papers were rejected by returning officers in Bogura and Feni. The widely understood reason was that she had been convicted in corruption cases.
But there was a problem in the paperwork.
The returning officers’ written orders, according to documents reviewed by Talukdar, cited a violation of the electoral code of conduct. They had not cited the principal legal provision associated with her disqualification. Khaleda Zia was in prison at the time, making the stated allegation of violating the campaign code particularly questionable.
BNP lawyers appealed the rejection to the Election Commission. But, as I came to understand it, they had not initially identified the significance of the discrepancy either.
Talukdar had.
On the morning of the hearing, he instructed his personal secretary to prepare a draft decision declaring Khaleda Zia’s candidacy valid on that legal ground.
I had been sitting in the appeals courtroom since morning, taking notes on the hearings. When I stepped outside at one point, I noticed Talukdar’s personal secretary moving hurriedly through the building. Curious, I watched.
He went to the second floor of the Election Building and met Kaiser Kamal, a senior BNP lawyer who is now deputy speaker of Parliament. The purpose, as I understood it, was to alert him to the legal ground Talukdar had identified.
Inside the hearing room, Talukdar continued to wait.
When Khaleda Zia’s appeal was finally called, his personal secretary stood behind the commissioners with the draft ruling. As the hearing began, Talukdar signaled to him. The document was passed forward.
Talukdar took the microphone and abruptly announced his decision: Khaleda Zia’s candidacy was valid. The room went quiet.
The other commissioners and officials appeared to have been caught off guard. After a pause, Helaluddin Ahmed, then the Election Commission secretary, intervened. This, he pointed out, was the decision of only one commissioner. The other four were entitled to give theirs.
And they did. Kabita Khanam, Brigadier General Shahadat Hossain Chowdhury, Rafiqul Islam and Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda each voted to uphold the rejection.
Talukdar lost, 4 to 1. That margin would become a familiar description of his place inside the Election Commission.
The 2018 election remains one of the most disputed elections in Bangladesh’s recent history, accompanied by widespread allegations of intimidation, restrictions on the opposition and ballots being stuffed before polling stations formally opened.
Within the Election Commission, Talukdar repeatedly separated himself from his four colleagues.
He did so formally, through notes of dissent.
On October 15, 2018, Talukdar walked out of an Election Commission meeting after alleging that his independence as a commissioner was being curtailed. He had sought to present a five-point proposal. When he was unable to do so, he submitted a written dissent and boycotted the rest of the meeting.
“The Election Commission cannot in any way curtail my rights,” he wrote. “Freedom of speech and freedom of expression are my fundamental rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”
His proposals were hardly abstract. He wanted the military’s role during the election clearly defined and troops deployed with magisterial powers. He called for a genuine level playing field for political parties, neutrality in the electoral administration, stronger institutional capacity for the Election Commission and meaningful dialogue with the government to restore confidence in the process.
The other four commissioners called the proposals unconstitutional. Talukdar also dissented over the introduction of electronic voting machines. Again and again, when he believed the commission had made the wrong decision, he put his objection in writing.
I once asked him why.
What was the point, I wanted to know, of fighting battles he knew he would lose? What could these dissenting notes accomplish when four commissioners could simply outvote him?
“I am writing these notes of dissent for history,” he told me. “Even if better times come 100 years from now, these notes of dissent will speak in court.”
It was a revealing way of understanding his conduct. Talukdar did not appear to believe he could transform the commission from within. He understood something else. He created a historical record showing that its decisions had not always been unanimous.
The distinction mattered to him.
Talukdar’s relationship with CEC Nurul Huda carried an additional complication.
Earlier in their careers, Nurul Huda had served as an officer subordinate to Talukdar. But Nurul Huda belonged to the 1973 civil service batch and ultimately became chief election commissioner. Talukdar joined the commission as one of its four ordinary commissioners.
The reversal in hierarchy itself was not necessarily remarkable in Bangladesh’s bureaucracy. What hurt Talukdar, from what I saw during my time with him, was the treatment he sometimes received from colleagues.
He could be remarkably defiant in public and deeply wounded in private.
There were days when I sat alone with him in his office as he spoke about his frustrations. At times he cried. On some occasions, remarks by Nurul Huda had affected him enough that he would sit by himself and weep.
None of this made him less combative professionally. Talukdar also believed he was being watched.
During and after his tenure at the commission, black vehicles sometimes followed him as he travelled around Dhaka, including near Parliament and Segunbagicha. On one occasion, a vehicle following him was surrounded, and those involved believed it was connected to the Directorate General of Forces Intelligence.
Two or three days before the 2018 election, the driver of one such vehicle was taken to Talukdar’s residence. A telephone call later came from the Secretariat seeking his release on security grounds. Talukdar refused.
There were threats as well. After a caller identifying himself as Subrata telephoned from Kolkata and threatened to kill him, a general diary was filed with the police. Pressure extended, in Talukdar’s view and that of those around him, to members of his staff.
On the morning before the 2018 election, his official driver was prevented from entering the Election Commission office and harassed. His squad vehicle was also rendered unusable.
The repercussions became more visible when Talukdar’s tenure ended. He declined to attend Nurul Huda’s farewell news conference and instead held his own, using it to describe what he regarded as the failures and irregularities of the commission.
Soon after Talukdar left office, members of his staff — including his personal secretary, assistant and personal officer — were removed from their positions, transferred or otherwise subjected to administrative pressure.
Some had already spent years without promotions. They had nevertheless continued working in Talukdar’s office through a politically fraught period.
There was a sentence Talukdar once said to me that I have remembered particularly clearly.
“Remember, Belayet,” he said. “One day Nurul Huda and the others will face justice in this Bangladesh.” At the time, it sounded like the conviction of a man who had spent years losing institutional battles.
Bangladesh has since changed dramatically. Nurul Huda is now in prison. The political order under which the 2018 election was conducted has collapsed.
That does not, by itself, prove every allegation Talukdar made, nor does it turn every dissenting opinion he issued into the correct one. His importance lies somewhere more specific.
Institutions under political pressure rarely collapse all at once. They are weakened through individual decisions — rulings accepted, objections suppressed, procedures bent and compromises normalized. The historical record can therefore depend on whether somebody inside the institution is willing to put his disagreement on paper.
Talukdar understood this perhaps better than most.
His decision on Khaleda Zia’s candidacy illustrates the point. He knew the other four commissioners could overturn him. They did. His ruling changed nothing about the election.
But it changed the record. There was no unanimous Election Commission decision on Khaleda Zia. There was a 4-to-1 decision, and Talukdar made certain that the “one” could not be erased.
He approached his other dissents in much the same way.
Mahbub Talukdar died on August 24, 2022. In the final period of his life, he remained preoccupied with Bangladesh’s elections, democracy and the possibility that voting rights might eventually be restored.
The last time I saw him, he was working on a manuscript. I asked if I could read it. He refused.
“No one will get to read this even a day before my death,” he told me. “The book will be published after I have left this world.” It was.
The book was called Nirbachonnama. In it, Talukdar recorded many of the uncomfortable episodes he had witnessed inside the Election Commission.
That ending was characteristic of him. He had spent years writing things down — dissenting when he could not prevail, documenting when he could not change a decision.
He knew that institutions have majorities. He also knew that history keeps the minority opinion.
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Belayet Hossain is a Journalist