When Donald Trump described India as a “hellhole,” outrage followed with predictable intensity. Yet outrage, while understandable, is not enough. A serious response must begin not with denial, but with recognition: for millions in India, life is marked by deprivation, precarity, and exclusion.
POVERTY remains widespread. Employment is insecure. Inequality deepens with each passing year. Since 2014, under Narendra Modi, economic growth has coexisted with the consolidation of wealth in fewer hands, while democratic institutions face increasing strain and social divisions sharpen. India’s crisis is not merely developmental—it is structural, rooted in how wealth, power, and opportunity are distributed.
But to accept Trump’s framing without interrogation is to enter a far more dangerous terrain: one where inequality is seen as a national failure rather than a systemic outcome.
For what India and the United States share is not simply poverty or inequality – they share a class structure that produces both.
More than a century ago, Karl Marx argued that capitalism is defined by the concentration of wealth and the exploitation of labour. This is not an accidental distortion of the system; it is its operating principle. Wealth flows upward; insecurity flows downward.
This logic is starkly visible in the United States today. Nearly 1,000 billionaires’ control over $8 trillion in wealth, while more than 770,000 people remain unhoused. In cities like Los Angeles and New York City, the proximity between extreme wealth and absolute deprivation is not an aberration—it is the system made visible.
Hunger persists in abundance. Housing exists, yet remains inaccessible. Healthcare is advanced, yet commodified. The market does not fail to provide; it succeeds in allocating resources based on purchasing power rather than human need.
This is precisely what Karl Polanyi an Austro-Hungarian economic historian, economic sociologist, and politician, best known for his book The Great Transformation, which questions the conceptual validity of self-regulating markets warned against: the transformation of land, labour, and life itself into commodities. He underlines how, when society is subordinated to the market, human welfare becomes secondary to profit. What follows is not balance, but dislocation – social, economic, and moral.
India reflects the same structure in a different form. Here, the working class is overwhelmingly informal, precarious, and unprotected. Agrarian distress drives migration. Urban labour survives without security. Growth is celebrated, but redistribution remains minimal. The system generates wealth – but captures it at the top. In both countries, then, inequality is not incidental. It is produced.
This class logic extends beyond national economies into the global order. Under a renewed Trump administration, the United States has intensified its use of trade policy as an instrument of coercion. Through Section 301 investigations and “reciprocal tariffs,” countries including India are pressured to open markets and align with U.S. economic priorities.
Such policies are framed as nationalist – defending domestic industry, protecting workers. But in reality, they are shaped by powerful economic interests: corporations, financial institutions, and industrial lobbies that stand to gain from controlled markets and favourable terms.
Trade, in this sense, is not an exchange between equals. It is a negotiation structured by power.And beneath that power lies class.
The same can be said of militarism. Global military spending has reached historic highs, led overwhelmingly by the United States. This is not simply about defense; it is about what economists have called military Keynesianism—public spending that sustains private industry, particularly the defense sector.
Here, the state functions as guarantor – not of welfare, but of accumulation. The contrast is stark: a government that claims fiscal constraint in addressing homelessness or hunger finds limitless capacity when funding weapons systems or military expansion. This is not a paradox. It is a hierarchy of priorities shaped by class power.
Perhaps the most human cost of this system is borne by those at its margins: migrants. At the U.S. border, the detention and mistreatment of child migrants expose the violence embedded within global inequality. Many of these children come from regions destabilized by the very economic and political structures the United States helps sustain.
What we are dealing with is not a series of isolated national failures, but a patterned outcome of how the global economy is organised. Across very different contexts—from the informal settlements of Mumbai to the encampments of Los Angeles—similar dynamics are at play: the financialisation of housing, the weakening of labour protections, the steady retreat of the state from welfare obligations, and the prioritisation of capital over livelihoods. These are policy choices, not inevitabilities.
The persistence of this order depends in part on fragmentation. Economic insecurity is experienced individually, while its causes are systemic. Workers are set in competition with one another across borders and sectors, even as capital moves with increasing freedom and coordination. The result is a politics that displaces accountability—directing frustration toward migrants, minorities, or other nations – rather than toward the structures that generate inequality.
In that sense, comparisons between countries often obscure more than they reveal. The relevant divide is less between India and the United States than between those who are able to convert economic power into political influence and those who cannot. Without addressing that imbalance, discussions about national success or failure remain partial.
This is why the question of democracy cannot be separated from the question of distribution. As B. R. Ambedkar argued, formal political equality sits uneasily alongside deep social and economic inequality. Where material conditions diverge sharply, the capacity to exercise rights, shape policy, or hold power accountable becomes uneven.
If the aim is to move beyond rhetorical judgments about “failed” societies, the focus has to shift—from comparing outcomes to examining structures; from assigning blame to understanding how policy, markets, and power interact to produce these outcomes. Only then does the discussion move from description to explanation—and from explanation to the possibility of change.
They arrive not as invaders, but as casualties. Yet they are treated as threats.
This is where B. R. Ambedkar becomes crucial. Ambedkar warned that political democracy cannot survive without social and economic democracy. A society that permits vast inequalities while claiming freedom is inherently unstable—morally and structurally.
His warning applies as much to the United States as it does to India.
To call India a “hellhole” is, therefore, not merely an insult. It is an evasion. It shifts attention away from the systemic nature of inequality and toward a simplistic hierarchy of nations—civilized versus backward, successful versus failed.
But reality resists such binaries.
If there is to be any meaningful reckoning, it must begin not with nationalist defensiveness, nor with imperial arrogance. But with a clear-eyed recognition that the crisis is shared.
It must be acknowledged that poverty in India and homelessness in America are not separate failures, but connected outcomes. That hunger, precarity, and displacement are not accidents, but products of a global order. That wealth at the top is inseparable from deprivation at the bottom.
And that until this order is transformed, no nation – however powerful – can claim moral authority over another. The truth is simpler, and far more uncomfortable:
We do not live in a world of “hellholes” and success stories. We live in a world structured to produce both – simultaneously. And the question is no longer who is worse. It is whether we are willing to confront the system that makes such comparisons possible at all.
This is the truth we evade at our own peril: there are no “hellholes,” only systems that manufacture them. As long as wealth is allowed to concentrate, power to harden, and human dignity to be rationed by the market, the geography of suffering will persist—from the streets of Mumbai to the sidewalks of Los Angeles. The real divide is not between nations, but between those who profit from this order and those who are made to endure it. Until that line is confronted, every judgment is hypocrisy – and every claim to moral superiority, a lie.
Let us be done, then, with the language of “hellholes.” It is not a description—it is a weapon. It reduces complex histories of exploitation, inequality, and resistance into crude moral hierarchies that serve the interests of those who benefit from them. It allows the powerful to name suffering elsewhere while normalizing it at home.
What confronts us today is not the failure of individual nations, but the success of a global system that produces deprivation alongside abundance with ruthless efficiency. From the informal settlements of Mumbai to the encampments of Los Angeles, from indebted farmers to precarious gig workers, the pattern repeats with disturbing consistency: wealth is accumulated, risk is displaced, and dignity is rationed. This is not mismanagement. It is design.
The system endures because it fragments those who suffer under it—by nationality, by race, by religion, by legality – while uniting those who profit from it across borders. It persuades the poor to blame the poorer, the citizen to fear the migrant, the worker to compete with the worker, even as capital moves freely, consolidates quietly, and governs decisively.
To confront this reality is to move beyond the comfort of comparison. It is to reject the false choice between national pride and national shame. It is to recognize that the line that truly matters is not between India and the United States, but between those who are protected by the system and those who are made vulnerable by it.
And once that line is seen clearly, neutrality becomes impossible.
For what is at stake is not merely economic policy or political rhetoric, but the very meaning of democracy. A society that permits vast concentrations of wealth alongside widespread deprivation cannot sustain the claim that it is governed by the will of its people. As B. R. Ambedkar warned, political equality cannot endure in the presence of deep social and economic inequality. The vote, in such conditions, risks becoming a ritual rather than a remedy.
The task before us, then, is not incremental adjustment but structural transformation. Not charity, but justice. Not growth without distribution, but an economy reordered around human need rather than profit. This requires more than policy change; it demands a reimagining of power itself—who holds it, how it is exercised, and in whose interest it operates.
Such a project will be resisted. It already is. By those who benefit from the present order, who will continue to cloak inequality in the language of efficiency, nationalism, and inevitability. But history offers a different lesson: that systems, however entrenched, are neither natural nor permanent. They are made—and can be unmade.
The question, therefore, is no longer whether India is a “hellhole,” or whether the United States is a model to emulate. These are distractions, designed to keep the conversation safely superficial. The real question is whether we are prepared to confront a world in which suffering is organized, inequality is engineered, and dignity is conditional. And if we are – what we are willing to do about it.
For until that confrontation begins in earnest, every judgment passed across borders will remain hollow, every claim to moral authority suspect, and every promise of progress incomplete. The time for comparison is over.
What remains is the harder, more urgent task: to dismantle the conditions that make such comparisons possible—and to build, in their place, a world where no society needs to be defended, and no people need to be diminished, in order for another to feel superior.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
