A graphic claiming that the Muhammad Yunus-led interim government in Bangladesh has cancelled holidays for major Hindu festivals, including Durga Puja, Janmashtami, and Saraswati Puja is being shared on social media platforms.
Among other users, X account Kreately, which has previously been called out for spreading misinformation, also shared this post, which gathered nearly 1.7 lakh views at the time of writing this report.
(Archived versions of more posts sharing this claim can be seen here, here, and here.)
Is it true?: No, the claim is false.
Official Bangladeshi government websites clearly note Durga Puja and Janmashtami as government holidays, but does not show Saraswati Puja in the list as it already falls on a weekend.
How do we know?: We looked for an official list of public holidays declared by Bangladesh's government for 2026.
To find the results quickly, we ran the search using Google Advanced search, using the operator 'inurl' to only show results which had 'gov.bd' in the URL.
This led us to the website of the Ministry of Public Affairs' website, which had published the holiday list for the year 2026 on 9 November 2025.
Since the list was in Bangla, we ran it through Google translate to understand it.
We saw that the government had declared 4 September as a holiday for Janmashtami and 21 October as a holiday for Durga Puja (Vijaya dashami) as 'General holidays.'
It additionally mentioned 20 October as a 'Government holiday by executive order' for the ninth day (Navami) of Durga Puja.
We then looked for news reports about these holidays, and found that 11 days that were usually marked as holidays had not been marked as such for 2026 as they coincided with weekends (Friday and Saturday), The Daily Star noted.
Claim debunked: Bangladeshi fact-checker Shohanur Rahman took to X to debunk the viral claim, sharing a similar screenshot to call out the misinformation.
He explained that Saraswati Puja fell on 23 January, a Friday, it was not mentioned as a separate holiday.
The official account for the Chief Advisor's press wing also clarified the same, stating that "...government holidays that coincided with weekly holidays (Friday and Saturday) were not counted again as additional holidays."
It categorically stated that the "claim that the holidays were cancelled is false."
Conclusion: A viral claim falsely states that the Bangladesh government has cancelled holidays for major Hindu festivals.
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