Are Indian politics and election becoming candidate focused?

In recent time, Indian elections are becoming more individual-focused than the party-focused. In fact, regional and the small parties are gaining more votes in the national elections because they know the local people and can field appropriate candidates. Realising the change in the system, prime minister manmohan Singh described the independent candidates as spoilers and requested the people to vote for national parties.

This change in the way people choose their candidates can be criticised on one account that it has given rise to the coalition government and we have noticed difficulties in running the coalition and lack of commitment to proceed with policy issues that might hurt any party.

But we can not ignore the benefits of individual-focused elections. When there is lot of criminalisation of politics and some of the parties are full of dreaded criminals, it is difficult for the humble and sincere candidates to join those parties and contest election. But they have option to join a party that is not popular in a particular state and still win the election. If people keep voting for the "good" candidates irrespective of which party they represent, this will force the parties to field "good" candidates. More or less the citizens of India are free to exercise their franchise to any candidate of their choice. So even in case of all the candidates are not so "good" they can elect the less bad option out of all.

This gives freedom to individuals to join BJP or Congress in West Bengal, a left state, or BJD of Orissa in UP and support the cause of poor Oriya people. So as they say change is always for good, we might assume this change is for good as well. But only time can tell if it is true.