This is regarding the editorial The Hindu carried on May 25.
It is a jumbo editorial written with a pre-set mind and possessing near zero noteworthiness.
Its first paragraph attempts to create space to say what it had decided beforehand: that the UPA II government is a “failure”. This it expands later on mentioning mainly two “defining” failures, namely, controlling the spiraling of prices of essential commodities, above all food items, and managing law and order.
That the prices have gone up is an indisputable fact, and the Government cannot hide behind any excuses, at least morally, for its failure. But whether it was entirely due to the government’s “lethargy” or “indecisiveness” or “complacency” or “corruption” is not that undisputable. That is OK and there is no need to repeat the truism that while facts are sacred, opinions are free!
But what it says further, at least the following, is a little baffling.
It says that the UPA II government seems to have spent its first 12 months “in a do-little state bred by political complacency and neo-liberal conservatism”.

I sent the following letter to The Hindu:
Sir,
This is regarding the editorial (May 25). It says that the UPA II government seems to have spent its first 12 months “in a do-little state bred by political complacency and neo-liberal conservatism”. ‘
As a diligent reader of The Hindu, I was curious to know what is neo-liberal conservatism and whether there is any other government in the world that is also Neo-liberal conservative, and I googled, but drew a blank. I understand ‘liberal conservatism’ itself is an oxymoron, in which case, ‘neo-liberal conservatism’ may only worsen the ambiguity.
Was it a Freudian slip? Was The Hindu, perhaps, thinking about a future coalition government of the (neo-conservative) BJP and the (neo-liberal) Left parties while writing the edit?

A Post Script to this response could be:
The Hindu seems to have achieved what it had been working for during the last two years, specifically, ever since the Left withdrew its support to UPA I and the government moved a confidence motion in the Parliament in July 2008. The BJP and the Left, as opposed to a common enemy, worked in unison to oust the UPA from power. They attacked the government almost on identical points and voted together on the same side. That it failed was only of incidental importance. The real significance of this coming together of the neo-conservative BJP and the neo-liberal Left was a new phenomenon in Indian politics – something almost everybody following the Indian political developments would have thought was impossible till a few years back. The Hindu with its inherent streak of Hindu orthodoxy (what else does the choice of its name ‘Hindu’ signify?) and the acquired leaning towards Left liberalism (a baggage its present Editor in Chief carried from his JNU days and the All India Vice Presidentship of the SFI) was eminently qualified to work towards this. Therefore, the use of ‘neo-liberal conservatism’ need not be an innocent slip; it could very well be a Freudian slip - making the impossible possible!