Topic: Founders and National Leaders
How does India mark Founders and National Leaders?
Gandhi Jayanti
- Local date
- October 2, 2026
On the Indian central government's annual holiday list, 2 October appears as Mahatma Gandhi's Birthday and sits in the compulsory "gazetted" tier — seventeen days in 2026 that close every central government office, alongside Republic Day (26 January) and Independence Day (15 August). India runs a second tier underneath it: twenty-nine restricted holidays for 2026 that each employee chooses from, and the density of person-named days in that list is far higher — Guru Ravi Das's birthday, Swami Dayananda Saraswati's birthday, Shivaji Jayanti, Rabindranath Tagore's birthday, Maharishi Valmiki's birthday, Guru Teg Bahadur's martyrdom day. India does not pick one national figure and stop; it offers a menu of them, with Gandhi promoted to the tier nobody can decline.
What is this topic?
In federal law the third Monday in February is still called Washington's Birthday. It is written that way in 5 U.S.C. §6103(a), the section that lists all eleven legal public holidays, and the Office of Personnel Management footnotes every annual holiday table to say that although states and businesses may use other names, its policy is to use the name in the statute. "Presidents' Day" is a state and retail habit that federal law never adopted. Taiwan went the other way and gave one man two dates: Article 3 of its Commemorative Days and Holidays Act lists both the birthday of the founding father (12 November) and the anniversary of his death (12 March), and Article 4 grants a day off for neither. Japan stripped every personal name out of its holiday law in 1948; none of today's sixteen national holidays carries an individual's name, and 29 April commemorates the Shōwa era rather than the emperor who reigned through it. Brazil's first republican decree in 1890 named Tiradentes outright, while the statute in force today says only "21 April".
Sources and dates
Dates follow local time zones, calendars, and official notices. Check the source when a date is estimated or locally variable.