WHY PICKING THE RIGHT LIEUTENANTS MATTERS

A global look at how leadership choices shape the destiny of nations — for better or worse

- BY MAKARAND R. PARANJAPE | Special to Gulf News

Let’s start not with positive but negative selection. Negative selection, as a concept, originates in evolutionary biology, where it describes the process by which deleterious traits are removed from a population to ensure survival.

In politics, however, it takes on a darker meaning: the deliberate elevation of incompetent or unqualified individuals to positions of power to secure the leader’s dominance.

This phenomenon is widely prevalent in authoritarian regimes and autocracies, especially the higher you go in the pecking order. But we often forget how it also poses a significant downside risk to large democracies, where the scale of governance and the complexity of institutions amplify its consequences.

Let us see how this plays out in the world’s largest democracy, India. In the United States, in contrast, the most watched and oldest democracy in the world, draining the proverbial swamp may be a fantasy if not delusion. It is, nonetheless, possible to bring in an entirely new set of leaders and administrators when a regime changes. Right now, for instance, Donald J. Trump, after his return to the White House in his second term as president, is effecting sweeping changes. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is just one example: the upending deeply entrenched interests and power blocs, not to mention the slicing through government departments and jobs with a hatchet rather than scalpel.

Loyalty over merit