The Daily Brief: Donations, Courts and Deepavali Smog

The Congress party's disclosed donations above ₹20,000 fell by nearly three-quarters in 2025-26, dropping to ₹130.69 crore from ₹517.39 crore the year before. An analysis of the party's contribution reports filed with the Election Commission shows this is the steepest annual fall in such donations in a decade; the last sharper decline was in 2015-16, when collections dropped about 86%.

The fall follows two strong years. The party had collected ₹281.48 crore in 2023-24 and ₹517.39 crore in 2024-25, the year the Lok Sabha elections were held. Much of the latest decline came from a single source: contributions routed through the Prudent Electoral Trust fell from ₹216.34 crore to ₹25 crore, a drop of about 88%. The trust was the only electoral trust named in the party's latest report.

For scale, the BJP collected ₹6,074.02 crore in donations above ₹20,000 in 2024-25, nearly twelve times the Congress figure that year, and has out-collected the Congress in every one of the twelve financial years examined. The BJP's 2025-26 report has not yet been made public by the Commission. The Congress figure, though sharply lower, is still above its collections in 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23. These numbers cover only disclosed donations above ₹20,000 and exclude electoral bonds, which were reported separately while that scheme ran; the party's total income also includes smaller donations, membership fees and coupon collections, which alone brought in ₹350.12 crore in 2024-25.

For Prelims, note the disclosure rule: parties must report donations above ₹20,000 to the Election Commission, and electoral trusts are a recognised channel for corporate giving. For Mains, the figures reopen the debate on the opacity of party finance: a single trust's withdrawal cut one national party's disclosed income by half, showing how concentrated and fragile the funding base of Indian parties remains.

The Election Commission has frozen the name and symbol of the All India Trinamool Congress since September 17, after the party split following its defeat in this year's Assembly elections, and asked both factions to prove which one is the real party. The rival camps, one led by Mamata Banerjee and the other calling itself the Democratic Trinamool Congress, are now flooding the Commission with affidavits from leaders and workers to establish their mass base.

The contest has turned messy. The Mamata camp has written to senior police officers alleging that the police are being used to collect dummy affidavits for the rival faction and that its own workers cannot even obtain stamp paper. The rival camp, in turn, alleged that a truck carrying its documents from Kolkata on October 24 was targeted near the Haryana-Delhi border, and says six of its trucks have reached the Commission. For the October 6 bypolls, the Commission allotted the two sides separate identities: the Mamata camp as the Mamata All India Trinamool Congress with a football-player symbol, and the other as the Democratic Trinamool Congress with an envelope symbol.

The Commission told the Supreme Court on September 29 that it needs at least six months to sift through the affidavits, which run into lakhs, and the Court suggested using artificial-intelligence tools to speed up the work. This is not the first such paper war: the AIADMK split in 2017 produced about 10 lakh affidavits, the Shiv Sena split in 2023 saw one faction alone submit about 23 lakh, and the NCP's two factions submitted roughly 40,000 and 60,000 respectively.

For Prelims, note the Commission's power to freeze a party's name and symbol and to decide disputes under the Election Symbols (Reservation and Allotment) Order, 1968. For Mains, the episode shows how the test of majority support has become a test of paperwork: when lakhs of affidavits decide a party's identity, the process rewards organisational muscle and strains the Commission's capacity to verify claims.

Israel's President has asked Gadi Eisenkot, the former military chief, to form the next government, after parties holding 67 of the 120 seats in parliament recommended him for the task. Eisenkot leads the centre-right Yashar party, which won 21 seats in the October election, and his bloc counts 48 seats with the centrist Together party, the left-wing Democrats and the right-wing secular Yisrael Beiteinu. Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition can count on only 46, after the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism refused to recommend him.

Eisenkot's path to a majority is narrow. The ultra-Orthodox parties hold 13 seats, but their central demand is to shield their young men from military conscription, which clashes with a core campaign promise of Eisenkot's allies. The Arab parties won a record 19 seats, but the Joint List has ruled out joining a government, and Yisrael Beiteinu's leader has ruled out any government that includes Arab parties or relies on their outside support. Eisenkot has said he will start with a minority government and has invited every party to join, provided it accepts his terms: recognising Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, accepting the values of the Declaration of Independence, backing universal national or civilian service, and agreeing that Hamas is a terrorist organisation that must be dismantled.

If Eisenkot fails, Netanyahu will be given the chance to form a government, and if he too fails, Israel faces another election, with Netanyahu staying on as caretaker prime minister in the meantime. Lawmakers are to be sworn in on Tuesday, and Eisenkot is moving first to install a new Speaker, which would hand his bloc control of key legislative committees. Among his camp's promises are repealing the judicial changes passed under Netanyahu and setting up a national commission of inquiry into the security failures before the October 7, 2023 attack.

For Prelims, note the arithmetic: 61 seats make a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, and Eisenkot starts with 48. For Mains, the deadlock illustrates the structural problem of Israeli coalition politics: a broad anti-Netanyahu majority exists, but it is split across parties that disagree on conscription, on the role of Arab parties and on the war, so the arithmetic of opposition does not easily become the arithmetic of government.

Democrats have won control of both chambers of the United States Congress in the November 3 midterm elections, ending Republican control for the final two years of Donald Trump's presidency. They are projected to hold at least 228 seats in the House of Representatives, a net gain of at least 19, and at least 54 seats in the Senate, a net gain of seven. Races in Alaska and Mississippi were still uncalled when the projections were made.

The Senate gains reached deep into Republican territory. Democrats flipped seats in Texas, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Maine, including the first Democratic Senate win in Kansas since the 1930s. The party also won five new governorships, in Nevada, Texas, Iowa, Ohio and Georgia, where Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor in American history. Exit polls pointed to the cost of living, tariffs and the war with Iran, which has pushed fuel prices up, as the forces behind the result.

With both chambers, Democrats can block legislation, launch broad investigations into the administration and slow senior appointments. They do not, however, hold the two-thirds Senate supermajority needed to remove a president on their own, or to override presidential vetoes. Trump has said he is willing to accept the results and work with the new Congress.

For Prelims, note the structure: all 435 House seats and a third of the 100 Senate seats were contested, and the party out of the White House has now taken at least one chamber in every midterm cycle since 2002. For Mains, the result matters for India because a divided American government changes the politics of tariffs, sanctions and the Iran war, all of which feed directly into India's energy costs and export prospects.

Bangladesh's Law Minister, Md Asaduzzaman, has described ousted prime minister Sheikh Hasina as a convicted criminal and said Dhaka has formally requested India to extradite her under the bilateral extradition treaty. He said the government would follow due process and act in accordance with the law rather than emotion, and that the Home Ministry, not the Law Ministry, is handling the matter. India has acknowledged receiving the requests and says they are being examined through established processes.

The request follows Hasina's conviction in November 2025 by Bangladesh's International Crimes Tribunal, which tried her in absentia for crimes against humanity during the July-August 2024 uprising and sentenced her to death on one charge and life imprisonment on another. Hasina fled to India on August 5, 2024, after a mass uprising ended her fifteen-year rule, and an interim government led by Muhammad Yunus took charge. Parliamentary elections in February this year brought the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by Tarique Rahman, to power.

The issue flared again in August, when Hasina told a virtual press conference organised in New Delhi that she intended to return to Bangladesh in December despite the risk of imprisonment. Dhaka said it was outraged that she had been allowed to address the media; New Delhi distanced itself, saying the event was organised by a private media entity with no government involvement.

For Prelims, note the framework: the India-Bangladesh extradition treaty governs the request, and the conviction came from the International Crimes Tribunal trying her in absentia. For Mains, the case is a classic extradition dilemma: a treaty obligation and a judicial conviction on one side, and the political sensitivity of handing over a former head of government who has been given shelter on the other.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has launched the Network Anubhav Platform, a geospatial and analytical dashboard that lets consumers check real mobile and broadband performance in their area, compare service providers and report spam. Launched on November 4 by TRAI Chairman Anil Kumar Lahoti, the platform is available at anubhav.trai.gov.in.

The dashboard brings together two kinds of data: consumer test results from TRAI's MySpeed and MyCall apps, and the regulator's own independent drive-test measurements. Users can zoom into a location on a map and see download and upload speeds, call quality and coverage, split by provider and technology, with percentile-based figures such as the median speed and the speed met by 80% of tests on mobile broadband. A web interface for Do Not Disturb services is built in, so subscribers can manage commercial-communication preferences and track complaints in the same place. TRAI has also released a MySpeed software kit so third-party apps can add connectivity measurement.

TRAI has cautioned that the figures come from user-generated tests and are not a comprehensive assessment of network quality under a standard testing method. Even so, the platform gives consumers, operators and the regulator a shared, location-wise picture of network quality, which operators can use to spot areas needing investment.

For Prelims, note the regulator and the tools: TRAI, set up under the TRAI Act of 1997, the MySpeed and MyCall apps, and the new dashboard at anubhav.trai.gov.in. For Mains, the platform is an example of regulation by transparency: instead of only penalising poor service, the regulator is publishing comparable performance data and letting consumer choice and public scrutiny do part of the work.

The Conference of Chairpersons of Public Accounts Committees of Parliament and State and Union Territory legislatures, held at Thiruvananthapuram on November 3 and 4, unanimously adopted the Keralam Resolution, an eight-point plan to strengthen financial oversight. Representatives from 27 states took part in the deliberations, held under the theme of audit, accountability and good governance.

The resolution commits every State and Union Territory PAC to building a digital oversight system such as the Audit Para Monitoring System, a web portal that tracks action taken on audit paragraphs, and to a centralised digital portal for sharing best practices between committees. It also calls for standardised timelines for submitting Action Taken Notes on audit findings and PAC recommendations, at least three PAC sittings a month, specialised sub-committees to clear pending audit paras, and closer work with the Comptroller and Auditor General, including forensic tools to flag high-risk areas. Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, who addressed the valedictory session, called for a common digital audit-monitoring platform for state legislatures on the lines of the one Parliament's committees already use.

Lok Sabha PAC chairperson K.C. Venugopal proposed that every legislature discuss at least one PAC report and that Union and State PACs meet annually on Centrally Sponsored Schemes. The PAC, one of Parliament's oldest financial committees, examines the CAG's reports, and by convention since 1967 its chairperson comes from the Opposition.

For Prelims, note the mechanism: the PAC examines CAG reports, and the Audit Para Monitoring System tracks the government's Action Taken Notes on audit paras. For Mains, the resolution matters because audit findings in India routinely wait years for a response: standardised timelines and a shared digital system attack the follow-up gap that has long weakened legislative control over public money.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India has seized 3,280 tonnes of banned and non-compliant food products worth about ₹82 crore during a nationwide inspection drive that ran from September 1 to November 5 to check adulteration during the festive season. The regulator inspected 56,431 food establishments across States and Union Territories, seizing items including paneer, ghee, milk and sweets.

The enforcement went beyond seizures. The regulator cancelled 52 licences, suspended 1,133 licences, sealed 314 establishments and issued 10,047 improvement notices to food businesses. The figures were announced on November 7, and the regulator said vigilance had been stepped up in view of the festivals. This calendar year it has also increased action against food businesses and e-commerce companies.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority is the regulator set up under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, and it is responsible for laying down science-based standards for food and for regulating manufacture, storage, distribution, sale and import.

For Prelims, note the scale: 56,431 establishments inspected, 3,280 tonnes seized, 52 licences cancelled and 1,133 suspended. For Mains, the drive illustrates the enforcement side of food safety: standards and testing matter, but the festive-season surge in adulteration is a recurring problem that a short drive can expose yet not eliminate.

Firecrackers were burst well past the 10 pm deadline set by the Supreme Court on Deepavali night, and pollution in parts of Delhi shot up to more than fifty times the World Health Organisation's safe limit. At 11 pm on Sunday, PM2.5, the fine particulate that does the most damage to health, measured 760.99 micrograms per cubic metre at Akshardham and 767 at Anand Vihar, against the WHO's 24-hour guideline of 15 micrograms. Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium recorded 702 micrograms, about 47 times the limit.

The city's average air quality index settled at 376 for the day, in the very poor category, up from 369 on Saturday, and the early-warning system expects it to turn severe from Monday for several days. The Graded Response Action Plan's Stage III curbs had already been invoked on November 6, when the index stood at 382. The Supreme Court had allowed only certified green firecrackers for two days of the festival, but the overnight readings show the restriction was widely ignored.

Transport was the largest single contributor to the city's PM2.5 load on Sunday at about 19%, according to the Decision Support System, with vehicle emissions and the peak stubble-burning season adding to the burden. The pattern repeats every winter: enforcement measures target the city's own sources while the seasonal fires in neighbouring states stay beyond their reach.

For Prelims, note the numbers: the WHO's 24-hour PM2.5 guideline is 15 micrograms per cubic metre, and the AQI bands run from good at 0-50 to severe at 401-500. For Mains, the night exposes the gap between orders and outcomes: a deadline, a graded action plan and a court-approved cracker regime together could not hold the line, which is why the debate keeps returning to year-round source control rather than festival-week firefighting.

More than 65 crore gold jewellery articles have received Hallmark Unique Identification numbers since mandatory gold hallmarking began in 2021, according to a government backgrounder released on November 5. Over 90 lakh silver articles have also been given HUID numbers. The number of registered jewellers has grown from 43,153 in 2021 to 2,36,624 as of October 15, 2026, while recognised assaying and hallmarking centres have risen from 948 to 1,565.

Mandatory hallmarking of gold jewellery came into force on June 23, 2021, initially covering 256 districts, and now extends to 392 districts. The framework covers seven caratages under Indian Standard IS 1417, from 9K to 24KS, and each hallmarked article carries a six-digit alphanumeric HUID code that a buyer can verify. Silver hallmarking remains voluntary, but every silver article submitted for hallmarking must carry a HUID number since September 1, 2025. Since June 8, 2026, assaying centres have uploaded photographs and weights of articles to the Manak Online portal, which buyers can view on the BIS CARE app.

The Bureau of Indian Standards is the sole agency running the hallmarking scheme in India, under the Hallmarking of Gold Jewellery and Gold Artefacts Order, 2020. The scale of the system, 65 crore articles in five years, makes it one of the largest consumer-protection exercises in the country.

For Prelims, note the facts: HUID is a six-digit alphanumeric code, mandatory gold hallmarking began on June 23, 2021, and coverage now extends to 392 districts. For Mains, hallmarking shows how a standards body can build consumer trust at scale: the combination of a unique ID per article, a verification app and a growing network of assaying centres turns purity from a claim into something a buyer can check.

A 19-month-old cheetah cub, KNG22, died on October 27 after being shot outside Kuno National Park in Madhya Pradesh, the first time a cheetah has been killed by gunfire since the reintroduction programme began in September 2022. The cub, the offspring of the South African cheetah Nirva, was found injured on October 25 in the Morena territorial forest division, about 50 kilometres from the park, and was taken to a veterinary university in Jabalpur, where surgeons recovered five firearm pellets from its body, one lodged in a lung. Despite treatment, it died the next morning.

The death takes the project's toll to 26, against 41 births since the programme began, leaving a total population of 58, of which 52 are at Kuno, four at Gandhi Sagar and two at the Veerangana Durgavati Tiger Reserve. A special task force formed by the Madhya Pradesh government has arrested two brothers and recovered a licensed muzzle-loading gun traditionally known as a bharmar; they have been booked under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. The task force found no organised wildlife-crime syndicate behind the killing, and six forest personnel have been suspended for negligence. The Centre dispatched a high-level team to investigate.

The case exposes a structural weakness in the programme. Free-ranging cheetahs now roam well beyond the park's core, but satellite collars give only periodic location fixes rather than continuous live tracking, so an animal in trouble outside the protected area can go unnoticed for hours. The cub was cremated at Kuno on October 29.

For Prelims, note the facts: Project Cheetah began on September 17, 2022 with eight cheetahs from Namibia, and KNG22 is the first cheetah to die by gunfire. For Mains, the killing shifts the debate from survival inside the park to survival outside it: reintroduction succeeds only if the landscape around the park, its people and its guns, is part of the conservation plan.

The Indian Navy's indigenous guided-missile stealth frigate INS Sahyadri arrived at Yokosuka Naval Base in Japan on November 4 to take part in Exercise Malabar 2026, the multilateral naval exercise of the four Quad partners. The exercise, which runs from November 5 to 12 in waters south of Japan's Kanto region, brings together the navies of India, Japan, the United States and Australia for a harbour phase of professional interaction and planning, followed by a sea phase of joint operations.

This is the 30th year of Malabar and the sixth edition involving all four Quad navies. Japan has deployed the helicopter destroyer JS Ise, the frigate JS Mogami, a submarine and a P-1 maritime patrol aircraft; Australia has sent the frigate HMAS Stuart and a P-8A Poseidon; and the United States has committed a P-8A and the amphibious transport docks USS Anchorage and USS John P. Murtha. The drills cover anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare. INS Sahyadri, a Shivalik-class frigate of the Eastern Fleet, arrived after completing a bilateral exercise with the South Korean Navy in Busan.

Malabar began in 1992 as a bilateral India-US exercise, with Japan becoming a permanent participant in 2015 and Australia joining in 2020. The exercise is presented as part of the vision of a free and open Indo-Pacific and of MAHASAGAR, the framework for mutual and holistic advancement for security and growth across regions.

For Prelims, note the participants and the platform: the four Quad navies, INS Sahyadri at Yokosuka, and the November 5-12 window. For Mains, Malabar is the operational core of the Quad: it converts a diplomatic grouping into interoperable navies that can operate together, which is what gives the partnership its deterrent value in the Indo-Pacific.