 Hello and let's talk about the NEET and JEE exams. These exams for obtaining entrance to the medical and engineering courses will be held as per schedule according to the National Testing Agency. The NEET for medical courses will be held on September 13th, while the JEE main will be held from September 1 to 6th. This is despite student organizations and many opposition parties pointing out that this is a bad idea at a time when the country has no handle on the pandemic. In fact, the Students Federation of India held an online campaign today called Health Before Exams to highlight this issue. Parents associations have also been making demands for postponing the exams and in a meeting of opposition parties, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamta Banerjee suggested that all opposition chief ministers approach the Supreme Court jointly on this matter. Last week, the Supreme Court dismissed the petition to postpone the exams. We talked to Deep Siddharth of the Students Federation of India on some of these issues. Hello and welcome to NEET. Today we are joined by Deep Siddharth with the All India Joint Secretary of the Students Federation of India and we will be talking to her about how the government has refused to postpone the national level entrance exams of JEE and NEET, which are crucial part of students careers. So, Deep Siddharth, can you tell us what kind of impact will this have on students lives right now? What would students go through if they have to get to the exam right now? And also, what is the S5 stands on this issue? The thing is that I think a lot of people are asking us this question that why we are demanding for postponement of the exam. I think it should first understand that why a group of students, like a large number of students, I would say, who are preparing for their NEET, who are preparing for their JEE for such a long time, along with that the 30-year students who were all somehow taking the preparation for their final examination. This must be a reason why all of a sudden all these students are coming together and saying that they're not going to give examination or they want the government to postpone the examination. Why so? I think the reason being that the way our government has failed in managing this pandemic situation and managing this COVID situation, that actually had brought in so many students, students who earlier didn't have any political affiliation, to come up and ask this question to government. If you see right now we are having the largest, third largest number of people who are affected with corona. If you look at the number of people who died due to COVID, we are having the fourth highest number in the whole world. And also daily the number of people who have been killed due to COVID, we are one of the top most countries. So in a situation like that where the government essentially could not do anything to give people this confidence that during a health crisis the government is going to take care of you, I think it's very natural that students are scared, students are feeling that in this pandemic situation if we are forced to go to examination center we might also get affected and this whole fear is not very unrealistic. We just have heard that few days back in Banarasan University where a student went to give his examination, he tasted positive after appearing for the examination and he had to admit in a hospital and all the examination that was scheduled later he was not able to sit on them. So this is a practical situation. People are scared because they all of course they are good students, they want to pursue certain carriers but at the same time they are scared of their lives. They do not want that for a sake of examination they compromise their health, they compromise their life. And I think in that situation only we see this many, so many people. I mean if you look at Twitter every day anything or anything around the postponement of examination need, JEE, all these things are trending and the number of tweets that have been tweeted sometimes that reach even million. So this is an actual situation that we are dealing with and from student petition of India we have believed in that the students life needs to be taken care of. You as a government you cannot just come and say that it's a student's own responsibility how they're going to go to examination. Even the NTE also had come up and said they're going to increase the number of seats, centers etc etc but we do believe that this is not enough because you also must see that we are not only fighting our health crisis, we are also fighting a situation where India is going to a huge unemployment crisis, people are committing suicide, people are dying out of hunger because of the unplanned lockdown, the question of employability, the question of livelihood is under threat. So and on that we have also seen that in different part of our country is also fighting natural calamity. We are seeing in Assam, we have seen in West Bengal, in Rajasthan, in Mumbai. So there are multiple problems that as a family as a student they're facing and right now we thought that whatever the government has done that is not enough to ask students to come and appear for examination. So from SFI our stand is that if at all the government is eager to take examination first they should ensure that the health of the students that their livelihood question is going to be answered by the government until and unless they do it, we do not see that there is a logic on putting so many young people into such a motorist. Our next segment is part of a series of conversations of the US-China relationship, especially the US tech assault on China. In this segment, Charles Yu of the Chia collective talks about the failing US attempt to build a coalition against China, especially on issues such as COVID-19. He also talks about the declining credibility of the US due to its failure to handle the epidemic properly. At the global level right now, do you see that the US has been actually able to gather allies for this, especially among its European allies or has this become more and more a losing cause? That's a really good question. I think that it's still kind of hard to say since we are very much in the middle of the pandemic now, but in material terms, I think that the very much uncontrolled and disastrous in both human and economic terms spread of COVID-19 that we've seen in the US and the wide public awareness of this globally, the fact that the US is on almost every country's sort of no travel list at the moment, right? It's testament to the fact that on balance, I think the pandemic has absolutely weakened the United States' credibility. Certainly, it's soft power apparatus and that the approach of at least the current administration has absolutely been to paper over and occlude and indeed falsify and exacerbate the scale of the pandemic in the United States while trying with ever greater desperation to pin the blame on China to sort of rewrite the narrative of the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to make China out to be at best a negligent, at worst inactively malicious after. And my sense is that it's not really taking. It's very hard comparing the just the visible indicators of this situation now with regard to COVID-19 in China versus the United States to make the claim that China as the very first country hit by it, which had to go through all the stages of identifying what was going on, of sequencing the virus, of establishing its human-trending disability, of essentially coming up with some kind of protocol exactly for controlling its spread and doing so under the circumstances quite successfully, that I think has just become harder and harder to deny. And this whole thing must be seen as well in, as you said, the broader context of the US painting China for various reasons, whether because of the fact of its increasing global reach, it's very foreign-ness in every sort of major respect to the traditional colonial or neocolonial centers of power as this kind of global threat. And this is where you see as well the prevalence of conspiracy theories that attribute the origin of COVID-19, for example, to like a Chinese lab, that try to put all this in a sort of biosecurity framework that lend itself very much to anti-Asian xenophobia, to targeting of people of Asian descent, particularly Chinese, both for sort of spontaneous acts of racial violence, such as we've seen in the US and across the wider world, and sort of on a more systematic level dovetailing with this narrative that like the presence of people of Asian descent is ipso facto in and of itself, you know, the inclusion of a necessarily foreign and dangerous element within one's own population, right, kind of treating the viral metaphor at the scale of the body politic of the entire country. That's what we're seeing operate on multiple levels, and I think it's no accident, right, that, you know, with the sort of apocal challenge to US credibility to, you know, at least sort of the ideological foundations of US hegemony in the world system that is presented by its catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic, you know, we're seeing the Trump administration in particular, you know, double down on the targeting of, you know, particular Chinese researchers, right, and indeed sort of, you know, academics of Chinese descent, even US citizens, right, in the United States itself. I think there's sort of a fairly broad coalition within, you know, the Asian American community generally, you know, including liberals against the sort of naked targeting that we've seen under the Trump administration, but I think a crucial weakness of that narrative is that it essentially takes as a given the prerogatives of the US state. It relies in many ways on the argument that, you know, these are, you know, whether Chinese nationals or, you know, US citizens or Chinese descent who are going to the point of applying for security clearances, right, who want to contribute to the economic and the in many cases the military betterment of the United States, you know, who are like a positive, you know, who are making positive contributions to, you know, US economic strength and military supremacy. And the essential weakness of that argument, you know, is that it ultimately relies on the same sort of ideological coordinates that, you know, form the crux of the entire, you know, sinophobic campaign being waged at a bipartisan level, you know, not just by Trump, but, you know, in many ways by the Democrats as well, who, you know, from the left to the right end of the ideological spectrum that they encompass have completely sort of bought in to the narrative of, you know, of China like stealing jobs, right, of it, you know, posing a threat to US hegemony and who's, you know, presidential nominee now, Joe Biden in many ways seems to be trying to outdo Trump in some aspects of his sinophobia, right, accusing him, for example, in a campaign ad of imposing the travel ban on China after the start of COVID-19 too late, right, of allowing in, you know, tens of thousands of potential like spreaders, you know, in a very, very racialized way. And this is why I think that there is, you know, absolutely a danger that, you know, if Biden wins in November, as it seems like he will, we will see a continuation of, you know, this kind of aggression on multiple fronts that you're referring to. But with a veneer, right, with a face that is much more palatable to, you know, the US and its allies, right, then Trump, who was absolutely willing, you know, particularly for the sake of his base to alienate, you know, traditional sub-imperial allies of the United States, right, Canada, the EU and so on. And so we're, you know, we're in a moment now where I think there have been many sort of like self-inflicted injuries on the US's credibility there that can very easily be papered over just by a change in administration. And, you know, without changing any of the fundamentals, which is that, you know, the US is still the hegemonic imperial power, you know. It still occupies a dominant position, thanks in particular to, you know, its outsized military budget, which is around 10 times the size of China's, right. It's actual global reach, you know, where it, you know, is able essentially to surround China on sort of the Pacific side, on Southern border, and in terms of its presence of the US presence in Central Asia, on Western border as well, with a string of, you know, US bases and forward deployments by naval and air forces as well, you know. And where in addition to that sort of physical, you know, cordon in some ways around China, it's exerting, you know, the same kind of negative aggression on an economic level as well. And I think that, you know, the left globally and in particular in the here in the US, right, this is something that we as the Chow Collective repeatedly return to. You know, we need to be clear-eyed about the fact that this is not, you know, an inter-imperial rivalry between equals, you know. It is, it's a country that, you know, sort of looking at historical experience of other socialist states, right, like the USSR in particular, you know, has adopted a long-term strategy of, you know, a clear-eyed view of what it takes to actually get to a position where it and other global south countries can actually, you know, pursue, you know, an independent strategy for their own development, right, for building their own productive forces. But we're still in very, very, you know, very much a weak position compared to the imperial hegemony, where it's in no position to mount a frontal challenge to US power. And where, you know, the, like, the actual dynamics are still very much, you know, like unilateral sort of one-directional aggression being levied against it by a much stronger power that is seeking to maintain its position against, you know, manifold threats that are, that are very much, you know, inherent to the global capitalist system as a whole. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. We'll be back tomorrow with major news developments from the country. Until then, keep watching NewsClick.