C.P. Chandrasekhar— The Logic of Neoliberal Anti-Populism

Specifically about India but applies in most other neoliberal countries as well.

Advocates of neoliberalism not only dress themselves as market fundamentalists but also present themselves as anti-populist. They don't dither when it comes to condemning any sign of the government using tax revenues to provide transfers or subsidies to the poor or undertake expenditures that are expressly meant to favour the poor, in the form of livelihood protection, poverty alleviation or free and universal provision of basic health and educational facilities. 

The justification for this is two- fold: that expenditure to support growth must be favoured over spending to directly improve welfare; and, that fiscal prudence must be privileged over all else when deciding the use of the exchequer’s resources. So if spending has to be tailored to correspond to revenues, expenditure on ‘populist’ measures must be limited or abjured….

The unwillingness or “inability” of the State to tax the rich reveals that it is not a neutral agency standing above all classes. It is partisan and represents the interests of a few.…

This has two consequences. On the one hand, right-wing anti-populism gains intensity to both divert attention from financial cronyism and to release resources for transfers to a small elite. On the other, means are devised to treat elitist hand-outs very differently from so-called populist sops, with the former being treated as measures to spur growth and the latter derided as a dampener on productive investment and therefore as being anti-growth.…

These are not the only form in which corporations are favoured. The pressure to please capital can even result in the government condoning tax avoidance, seeing it as a signal that the tax concerned should be done away with.…

Incentivising repatriation by privileging profits earned abroad relative to those earned domestically amounted to condoning the practice of keeping such profits abroad in order to avoid taxation.…

These, however, are not ‘sops’ to be surprised by. They constitute the essence of neoliberal policy, which allows the behaviour of private capital to determine what policy should be.…

Providing large transfers to the rich while pursuing fiscal consolidation requires trimming expenditures that benefit the poor. This, rather than any technocratic logic, explains the ideology of “anti- populism.”

The Logic of Neoliberal Anti-Populism (PDF)
C.P. Chandrasekhar | Professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

This article was originally published in the Frontline, Print edition- August 22, 2014.