In the final weeks before the assembly elections in Assam, a video spread rapidly across millions of phones. It showed the sitting chief minister of the state appearing to fire a gun at Muslim men, accompanied by a caption that read, “No Mercy.” The video was AI-generated and it was shared from the official party account, and later deleted, only when it had done its work.Earlier in his campaign speeches, the chief minister had urged supporters to “trouble” a specific religious community “by any means” possible. The casualty in all these episodes, unfortunately, turned out to be political decency.A screenshot of the controversial X post from February 2026, featuring Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma shooting at Muslim targets, which the BJP later deleted from its X account.The instinctive response, at most, to such an episode would be feeling moral outrage. But outrage, however justified, doesn’t explain the pattern. It doesn’t tell us why such conduct repeats, why it faces little or no consequence, or why it appears to be electorally effective. The answer may lie, unexpectedly, in some 19th-century evolutionary theories. Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism rested on the idea of “survival of the fittest”, often taken to mean the triumph of the strongest. However, for Darwin, fitness was not a virtue, nor signalled strength: it was about adaptation. What survives is not what is strongest or the most ethical, but what best fits its environment.The larger question the Assam election invokes, then, is not whether Indian politics has become indecent. It is whether indecency has become the fittest trait of the political environment. Is Indian politics turning Spencerian, where the most indecent prevails? Or is it Darwinian, where the system rewards what best adapts, even if that adaptation is coarseness?From petri dish to national factoryThe assumption about India’s political culture is that it flows from the top down, where national ideological currents determine the character of state campaigns. However, the reality is that the state elections are laboratories where provocations are first attempted, limits are tested under thinner media scrutiny, and a template gets certified by en masse deployment. Indecency validated in state politics does not stay there; it actually migrates.In 2023, a year of multiple state elections, the principal drivers of hate speech were not politicians but fringe religious figures and the heads of hardline outfits operating outside formal party structures. The role they played was to prime the ground at the ward and block level, test the rhetoric, and condition audiences before the formal entry of political leaders. Nearly 70% of that year’s hate speech incidents clustered in states with elections imminent, establishing state contests as primary sites of hateful mobilisation.In 2024, this arrangement shifted. National leaders moved to the centre of mobilisation. The ruling party directly organised 340 hate speech events, up from 50 in 2023, a 580% increase, marking a transition from dispersed experimentation to centralised deployment.The 2025 data points to consolidation. In its yearly report on hate speech events in India, India Hate Lab recorded 1,318 incidents, nearly four a day, marking a 97% rise from 2023. And this was in a non-election year. Unlike earlier cycles, mobilisation did not recede between elections. Hate speech persisted beyond campaign periods, becoming a routine political activity. So “just” episodic escalation around elections were no longer the norm and a “continuous-campaignised-governance” took its place. The logic of campaigns now extended into the everyday practice of governance.The machine rewards indecencyBetween January and May 2024, political parties spent Rs 290 crore on over two lakh advertisements on Google alone, a 947% rise from the equivalent period in 2019. On Meta, 19 proxy, surrogate and shadow advertiser accounts were among the top 100 political spenders that ran nearly 15,000 advertisements worth Rs 19 crore. These pages were untraceable and beyond regulatory oversight.A Centre for the Study of Developing Societies study of third-party political advertisers on Meta found that 11% of advertisements carried Islamophobic undertones, 56% disseminated misinformation and nearly 10% contained derogatory content. In the middle of the 2024 Lok Sabha election, India Civil Watch International and Ekō, a corporate accountability organisation, identified 22 AI-generated ads that openly violated Meta’s hate speech rules. According to their report, Meta approved 14 of those 22 advertisements within 24 hours. Among them were explicit calls targeting Muslims, including one that approved known dog-whistle slurs directed at Muslims, such as, “Let’s burn this vermin”, which the platform cleared despite breaching its stated policies.The target audience receiving all of this content is also seen to be the most impressionable. Nearly 80% of first-time voters encountered misinformation before casting their votes in the 2024 national election. Their political instincts are being calibrated by machines that have no interest in decency and every incentive to amplify the opposite.Who dug the gutter?Let us return to the original poser: Is Indian politics Spencerian, where the most indecent prevails by right, or Darwinian, where the system rewards the one who adapts? The evidence points to something more fundamental than either.Evolutionary biology may have an answer. A beaver doesn’t just adapt to its environment; it creates the conditions it later inhabits. Indian politics reflects something similar. India’s parties have created and shaped the political conditions by building regulatory gaps, funding digital infrastructure and outsourcing ground-level provocation and then they compete within that environment. The adaptation is real. But so is the construction. The same actors who thrive in this ecosystem built it too. As a result, what began as “survival of the fittest” has become “survival of the filthiest”.The most consequential outcome of this structure is not only the politicians it has already produced. It is also the inference available to those now entering the field. A young political aspirant in India today might not need to study an on-ground strategy to understand what works. The evidence is abundant for them to know what ‘fitness’ to enter and sustain in politics looks like.In the Social Darwinist imagination, “the drunkard in the gutter” is a failure of character, placed there by nature. However, in Indian politics, the gutter is not where the unfit are discarded. It is, in fact, a launchpad, a site for building careers and conditioning the next generation of leaders.Darwin would not be disturbed by this. He would observe, with characteristic detachment, that the organism adapts to the environment it inherits. But he might also pause at what the evidence reveals: that the organism did not merely inherit this environment. It built it. And then he would ask, as we should too: who built the gutter, and whether those who built it have any will left to clean it.Abhishek Sharma is a senior policy and political researcher. He is head of research at the office of the national secretary, AICC, and formerly worked with CSDS.