George Monbiot (Guardian Utd): This is what we paid for

From the Guardian Unlimited (UK)
Dated Tuesday May 18

This is what we paid for
The Blair protege and outrider for India's ruinous free market experiment has been voted out
By George Monbiot

Tony Blair has lost the election. It's true he wasn't standing, but we won't split hairs. His policies have just been put to the test by an electorate blessed with a viable opposition, and crushed. In throwing him out of their lives, the voters of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh may have destroyed the world's most dangerous economic experiment.
Chandrababu Naidu, the state's chief minister, was the west's favourite Indian. Tony Blair and Bill Clinton both visited him in Hyderabad, the state capital. Time magazine named him south Asian of the year; the governor of Illinois created a Naidu day in his honour; and the British government and the World Bank flooded his state with money. They loved him because he did what he was told.
Naidu realised that to sustain power he must surrender it. He knew that as long as he gave the global powers what they wanted, he would get the money and stature that count for so much in Indian politics. So instead of devising his own programme, he handed the job to the US consultancy McKinsey.
McKinsey's scheme, Vision 2020, is one of those documents whose summary says one thing and whose contents quite another. It begins, for example, by insisting that education and healthcare must be made available to everyone. Only later do you discover that the state's hospitals and universities are to be privatised and funded by "user charges". It extols small businesses but, way beyond the point at which most people stop reading, reveals that it intends to "eliminate" the laws that defend them, and replace small investors, who "lack motivation", with "large corporations". It claims it will "generate employment" in the countryside, and goes on to insist that more than 20 million people should be thrown off the land.

The Indian election is another popular rebuke to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism makes false promises to the masses and ends up siphoning the wealth of a developing nation to the transnational corporations of the global North. It has not delivered on its promises and really wasn't designed to deliver.

As progressives, let us raise a glass to the Indian elections.

Is different from neoconservatism how?