BAPS Monks’ Approach Towards Eiffel Tower’s Women Staff is a Form of Untouchability

SWAMI VIVEKANANDA hailed by Americans as a cerebral Hindu monk following his spell binding address delivered at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago on September 11, 1893 was deeply impressed by the presence of a huge number of  women at his numerous lecture events in the USA. In a letter to one Haripada Mitra written from Chicago on September 28, 1893, he paid glowing tribute to the women of America and remarked, “Oh, how free they are! It is they who control social and civic duties. Schools and colleges are full of women and in our country women cannot be safely allowed to walk in the streets! Their kindness to me is immeasurable. Since I came here, I have been welcomed by them to their houses. They are providing me with food, arranging for my lectures, taking me to market, and doing everything for my comfort and convenience. I shall never be able to repay in the least the deep debt of gratitude I owe to them. Do you know who is the real Shakti-worshipper? It is he who knows that God is omnipresent.”

Outrageous Conduct of BAPS Monks 

133 years later on September 7, 2026, outrageous actions of a 100 monks of Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (‘BAPS’), a Hindu religious sect, vis-a-vis women staff of Eiffel Tower in Paris has tarnished India’s image leading to the French people and the whole of  France got outraged. 

Those 100 monks during their visit to the Eiffel Tower in Paris asked its management to keep its women staff away from their sight. Such disgraceful conduct in French soil, apart from contravening India’s   constitutional values, which provides equal space to women in the public sphere, brutally assaulted the enduring values of the French Revolution anchored in the ideals of ‘Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’.  The Republican ideals of France have been shaped by those values and continue to nourish them and inspire other countries including India.

The damage to India’s reputation is all the more intense and pronounced because those monks participated in the online inauguration of their  temple, located near Paris, by Prime Minister Modi. 

It is quite preposterous that those monks of BAPS insisted that women staff of Eiffel Tower should be kept out of their sight during their visit to the Tower. Apparently the reasoning that they advanced was that they, as life long celibates, strictly follow the tradition of BAPS mandating  that women should not be there in the range of their visibility. It is all the more strange that the Eiffel Tower management paid heed to such insistence and segregated women staff from men and asked the former to keep away from duty till the visit of those monks to the Tower got over. 

Uproar in France  

The anger and resentment against the exclusion of women from the Eiffel Tower staff  was so widespread that it was severely condemned by high functionaries and even triggered protests causing employee walkout and the closure of the iconic Tower for a day.  The  local trade union spokeswoman remarked that  it was “a humiliating experience for the women to be made invisible in a public space, even more so at a national symbol like the Eiffel Tower”. Strongly disapproving of it Ariel Weil, the president of the company that runs the Eiffel Tower, described the incident as  “totally shocking and unacceptable” and ordered an internal investigation to fix accountability and ensure that in future such shameful treatment of women staff would  never be repeated. He added that what happened was  in contravention of  the  values of the company and  the principles of equality between men and women  and promised  to accept the consequences. 

France’s Gender Equality Minister Aurore Berge expressed indignation and anger at the Eiffel Tower incident by saying, “In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves.” Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen disapproved of the scornful  incident and said France would “never accept that women’s presence be ‘limited’.” 

Gabriel Attal, a leader expected to pitch himself to contest elections for the  head of State, said: ‘In France, no culture, no belief, no religion, nothing and no one can come and dictate to women what their place should be.’

Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire, while announcing that  an  investigation would be launched, recognised  employees’ anger as legitimate and affirmed  that gender equality must apply everywhere in the city. “It is not acceptable,” he said, “that such conditions can be tolerated,”