Diwali school holiday fight resumes in Albany
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By Jacob Kaye
Several months after the mayor announced that he’d be looking to Albany to make Diwali an official New York City public school holiday, a number of South Asian residents from Queens and beyond rallied in the state capitol building in support of a bill that would do just that.
The rally was organized around a bill from a number of Queens lawmakers, including State Senator John Liu and Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar, that would eliminate Brooklyn-Queens Day, otherwise known as Anniversary Day, as a school holiday and replace it with a day for students and their families to celebrate Diwiali.
The legislation is the latest effort to establish the holiday celebrated by over 200,000 New Yorkers, a plurality of which live in Queens. Though South Asian communities across the World’s Borough and the city have long fought for the establishment of a Diwali school holiday, Tuesday’s rally was perhaps the largest showing of government support toward the creation of the holiday in recent years.
“We have never seen such enthusiasm for this cause,” said Rajkumar, who introduced the bill in the Assembly on behalf of the mayor and Schools Chancellor David Banks. “We stand here today as proud Americans, and we are here to say that Diwali is an American holiday.”
Despite the clear support for the creation of a Diwali school holiday, similar efforts made throughout the years have failed. Even with over two dozen state lawmakers signed onto the legislation, community leaders in Queens remain skeptical of the efforts being made to complete a promise that they say has been made to them before.
Days before the start of Diwali last year, Adams, Banks and Rajkumar announced their intention to swap Brooklyn-Queens Day with Diwali.
Prior to Adams’ election, the then-mayor-elect was asked by Richard David, a district leader in South Queens, whether or not he supported the effort to establish the day off from school. Adams responded by saying that once he was elected, he would take his oath of office and walk into City Hall and “sign it into a holiday.”
But once elected to office, the mayor found that establishing the holiday proved more difficult. The city’s DOE is required to give students at least 180 days of instruction, and the mayor didn’t immediately find a day to swap a Diwali holiday with – some community leaders have criticized the mayor for not looking for other ways to manipulate the school calendar beyond swapping out an already existing holiday.
“We found a way to do it,” Adams said in October. “Chancellor Banks and his team sat down, looked at the requirement of school days and instead of looking from a place of deficit we look for a place of surplus, and because of that we were able to identify a way of using legislation partnering with the assemblywoman to identify the days that we can use to have this important holiday – a Diwali holiday without our young people missing days of school in the process.”
Several local community leaders in Queens were also critical of the mayor following the announcement, urging him to find a way to establish the holiday at the city level, rather than deferring to Albany to make the change.
Under the mayor’s current plan, the change needs to be made by the state legislature because Brooklyn-Queens Day was established by state law.
The legislation that was introduced by Rajkumar and is being carried by Queens State Senator Joseph Addabbo in the Senate establishes a Diwali holiday and eliminates Brooklyn-Queens Day from the school calendar. The legislation only applies to public schools in New York City. Though the bill has 24 co-sponsors in the Assembly, including Queens Assemblymembers Catalina Cruz, Nily Rozic, David Weprin, Edward Braunstein, Steven Raga, Ron Kim, Jessica González-Rojas, Stacey Pheffer Amato, Jeffrion Aubry, Khaleen Anderson and Daniel Rosenthal, it only has one co-sponsor in the Senate – Liu.
The fight to establish Diwali not only as a school holiday, but one that is recognized by New York City’s municipal government has been underway for decades.
In 2002, Weprin and Liu, who were both city councilmembers at the time, co-sponsored legislation to eliminate alternate side parking during Diwali. In the legislature, State Senator Kevin Thomas, who represents a portion of Nassau County, carried a similar Diwali school holiday bill for four years but didn’t see it pass. A Diwali school holiday bill introduced by Rajkumar in 2021 never made it out of committee.
But lawmakers appeared optimistic about the current legislation’s future on Tuesday as chants of “Diwali holiday” rang out in the capitol building.
“Let’s keep up the pressure, let’s keep up the hard work, reach out to your legislators,” Braunstein said. “A lot of you came up for the city…and being here makes a difference.”
“We’re almost there,” he added.
Queens Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who, along with Rajkumar, was one of the first South Asians elected to the Assembly, was critical of the mayor’s decision to defer the creation of the holiday to Albany back when the announcement was first made. He continued his criticism at Tuesday’s rally.
“For too long, our communities, the South Asian communities, have been recognized in symbolism but not in substance,” he said. “What has not been able to be done by this mayor, or by the last mayor, we will finish in Albany.”
“It is past time Diwali is made a holiday,” he added.
Whether or not the bill passes, some in the South Asian community in Queens and New York City may already be confused about the status of the holiday, according to Aminta Kilawan-Narine, the co-founder of Sadhana Coalition of Progressive Hindus.
Kilawan-Narine said that she got a call from a Queens resident on Monday night confused about why a rally in support of a Diwali holiday in Albany was needed.
“I definitely think that there's confusion,” Kilawan-Narine said. “This person called me last night and said, ‘I was thinking about going to Albany because I want a Diwali holiday but I thought they already said that it’s going to be a holiday.’”
“The position that we're in right now is not not unique to previous positions where there have been state-level pieces of legislation to create this as a holiday – the mechanism by which it becomes a holiday is different, but it doesn't mean that this is a new thing,” she added.
Should the bill pass and be signed into law by the governor before July 1, Diwali will be recognized as a school holiday during the 2023-2024 school year. If it is passed after July 1, the holiday will not be recognized until the 2024-2025 school year.
Diwali is a multi-day festival that celebrates the power of light over darkness. The annual holiday generally falls during October or November. The centuries-old celebration originated in what is now India. The festival’s largest celebration typically takes place on the third day of the holiday – that would be the day school children have off if the bill passes into law.
