The colluding elite group, whether bureaucrat or business tycoon, could not care less who the candidate is or how he manages to win. It is then a matter of one's bias as to blame for the criminalisation of politics. One could just call it elitisation as all the leaders of most election winning parties have already been won over by the elite groups. If there be any doubt that this is not so, then the same can be resolved by referring to the economic policies pursued by the major parties in the Centre and the States during the last decade. It is not that there is total identity of views among these parties in respect of these policies.
Small differences do crop up.
For the elite is not totally homogeneous. However, the interests of the elite have generally been protected. To the extent that they now coincide with those of the multinational companies in jointly capturing the large Indian markets or in turning India into a major exporter of agricultural commodities, as happens to be the case in South American countries which have long been under the tutelage of the US-based MNCs, successive governments in India have collaborated with international capital in accepting the WTO in the opening of the economy and in privatising the public sector. However, if the peasantry were to realise that the new policy of commercialising agriculture and creating very large farms, thereby displacing them from their holdings, big and small, without providing alternative means of livelihood, then the situation could under a radical change. For, the large mass of land-owning families in our country, with its unparalleled density of population and millions of land holdings, cannot either be easily uprooted from the rural settings nor absorbed in other professions.