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,”
France based Christophe Jaffrelot, a professor of South Asian politics and sociology, in an interview with Karan Thapar said that the BAPS sect’s practice of segregating women clashed with French republican values of equality, particularly in a public space as iconic as the Eiffel Tower. He noted that the involvement of the Indian embassy and the close relationship between the BAPS movement and the Modi government suggests that this was not merely a private religious matter but a political one that has embarrassed the Macron government in France. He proceeded to add that the inauguration of the BAPS temple by Modi is indicative of the influence of the BAPS sect in France in contravention of the ideas of the French Revolution.
The Indian diaspora expressed concern that such shameful incidents might trigger anti-immigrant backlash. One prominent group, the India Alliance Paris (‘IAP’), stated in a social media post, “The Eiffel Tower story must not become fodder for more racism. BAPS is a regressive sect, politically connected to India’s far-right. It should be treated like the sexist, casteist, backward sect it is. BAPS does not represent all Hindus, and it certainly does not represent India.”
The spokesperson of the Indian Ministry of External Affairs distanced itself from the issue of exclusion of women staff from duty during visit of 100 monks to Eiffel Tower and merely commented that it was aware of the inauguration of the BAPS temple in the Paris region but had nothing to do with the Tower issue involving the concerned parties.
Unseeability of Women, a Brutal Form of Untouchability
To make women invisible or unseeable so that monks of BAPS are not defiled reminds the scourge of untouchability which has been abolished by the Constitution of India under Article 17. Almost hundred years back on October 7, 1927 Mahatma Gandhi while speaking at a public meeting at Tinnevelly said, “After all, that untouchability which, in its most excessive and excruciating form, has given us the untouchables and unseeables, has been running through the core of Hinduism.” “Unseeable” term he used for those Dalits whose very sight would pollute or defile the caste Hindus who, therefore, made them stay beyond their visibility range all the time. So the legacy of BAPS making women unseeable, be it in India or elsewhere in the world including at Eiffel Tower, is nothing but the continuation of the abominable practice of untouchability the sting of which Congress President and Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge felt badly when the venue in Haldwani where he delivered a speech was purified. Obviously that purification was done to cleanse the place taking into account the Dalit identity of Kharge. Only after repeated attempts of his party, spanning more than a month, that a FIR was filed against those who did the purification.
Gandhi on the Practice of Untouchability by Swamynarayanas
BAPS is a Swamynarayan sect. It has an inglorious tradition of following the practice of untouchability and Mahatma Gandhi in a piece, “Untouchability Among Swamynarayans and Jains” published in Harijanbandhu on March 26, 1933 wrote, “I did not know this. I had always believed from my childhood that there was no untouchability at all among the Swaminarayans because the Gandhi family has had a very close relations with the followers of this sect for many years past.”
The insistence of those 100 monks in Paris that women should be made unseeable during their visit to Eiffel Tower demonstrated that BAPS, as part of the Swamynarayan sect, is upholding the practice to segregate people in the name of their caste and gender identities.
On February, 1, 1948 Gandhi referred to complaints of some Harijans (now called Dalits) that they were not allowed to enter a Swamynarayan temple in Bombay (now Mumbai) and they protested against it by offering Satyagraha. He advised them not to continue the Satyagraha and exercise patience because the Bombay Government passed a law that all should be permitted to enter temples regardless of caste identities.
BAPS Resisted Temple Entry by Dalits
G. Sampath in his article, “BAPS | ‘Sacred’ demands,” published in The Hindu on September 13, 2026, revealed how the wider Swaminarayan tradition to which BAPS belongs resisted the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act, 1947 allowing entry of Dalits to Hindu temples which were not open to them due to the practice of untouchability by caste Hindus. Sampath wrote, “They litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, going to the extent of arguing that Swaminarayan Sampradaya constituted a religion ‘distinct and separate’ from Hinduism and therefore its temples did not come under the legislation governing Hindu temples. In a landmark judgment, the Supreme Court ruled against them.”
BAPS Monks Upheld Manusmriti, Negated Ambedkar’s Vision
It is clear from the historical details that what the BAPS monks did at Eiffel Tower to make women unseeable is nothing but a sinister form of untouchability put into practice in an iconic public tourist place of France visited by millions from across the world. While in Paris their conduct as Indians should have been informed by the values of our Constitution and constitutional morality and the law of France to eschew those inhuman practices of shunning women.
It is no exaggeration to say that the conduct of BAPS monks in asking women to remain unseeable for them signals their adherence to Manusmriti which according to B.R. Ambedkar resulted in the downfall of Hindu women in India’s history. In his 1950 article, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Hindu Woman: Who Was Responsible for It?’ he categorically held Manu for the inferior status of women. The monks of BAPS in treating women as unseeable creatures affirmed that inferior status and upheld Manusmriti. The fact that those monks acted in that unacceptable manner in negation of the Republican values of France guaranteeing equality and equal space for men and women brought out their sense of contempt for the French Revolution which was rooted in the ideals of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.
Burning of Manusmriti and the Fall of the Bastille
It is instructive to note that Ambedkar burnt Manusmriti in 1927. He wrote that “The burning of the Manu Smriti by the Untouchables at Mahad in 1927 is an event which has the same significance and importance in the history of the emancipation of the Untouchables which the Fall of Bastille had in the liberation of the masses in France and Europe.”
So in making women invisible in Eiffel Tower those monks were acting against the emancipatory vision of Ambedkar and the ideals of French revolution. Such regressive action tragically has the support of powers that be in India and it was evident from the participation of those monks in the inauguration of the BAPS temple near Paris by none other than the Prime Minister of India. Only by upholding the Constitution can we defeat such forces and celebrate the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.