Eiffel Tower staff go on strike after women are sidelined by BAPS delegation 

The Eiffel Tower has survived wars, occupations, terrorist attacks, political upheavals, protests, and millions of tourists taking photographs of themselves pretending to hold its tip. 

What briefly brought the Paris landmark to a halt this week was considerably stranger: a dispute over whether women working there should be visible to a visiting Hindu religious delegation. The furore caused the iconic Eiffel Tower to be shut down, as workers protested vehemently. 

The controversy followed a private visit on Saturday by around 100 members of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, or BAPS, which was in France for the inauguration of its first traditional Hindu temple in the country, in Bussy-Saint-Georges, east of Paris. The organisation’s spiritual leader, Mahant Swami Maharaj, 92, was in France for the celebrations. BAPS describes him as its sixth and current spiritual guru. 

According to Eiffel Tower employees and their union, female workers were instructed to leave their workstations or move away as the delegation passed. Some positions were reportedly filled by male colleagues, while other women were told not to enter particular areas during the visit. Staff described the instructions as effectively making female employees “invisible” because of their sex. 

SETE, the company operating the Eiffel Tower, has acknowledged that the delegation requested arrangements intended to limit “interactions with women”. More importantly, the company has conceded that such conditions should never have been accepted, saying they were incompatible with its values and the principle of equality between men and women. 

In most of the Western world, religious freedom is fundamental. But so is the freedom of an individual, A religious organisation such as BAPS is free to to observe its own rules, such as its strict monastic tradition around celibacy and interaction between male ascetics and women. The organisation also maintains separate activities and facilities for men and women in many contexts. 

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about a religious community imposing demanding rules on its own clergy. The problem begins when those rules leave the temple, and they begin to be imposed on others without their will being taken into account. 

A private spiritual discipline becomes a public workplace issue when employees of a French institution are instructed to rearrange their professional lives according to somebody else’s religious requirements. The women working at the Eiffel Tower had not taken vows of celibacy. They had not joined BAPS. They were simply doing their jobs. 

BAPS has denied deliberately excluding anyone, saying the visit was arranged with the Eiffel Tower team to avoid inconvenience to other visitors. It has also apologised to anyone who was hurt or inconvenienced, while saying that, to its knowledge, nobody was prevented from entering the monument. 

That explanation, however, leaves an uncomfortable question hanging: why should “avoiding inconvenience” require female employees to leave their posts in the first place? And is an “apology to anyone who was hurt or inconvenienced” really an apology, as much as an appeasement?  

The episode is particularly awkward for BAPS because the organisation presents its global expansion in terms of service, harmony, cultural exchange, and inclusivity. Its new Paris temple is explicitly described as a sanctuary of faith, harmony, and service for Europe, while the local government has welcomed the project as a celebration of cultural diversity. 

Those are admirable ambitions. They also create a higher standard. The organisation’s critics have previously raised much more serious questions. In 2021, an FBI raid followed a lawsuit alleging that workers at BAPS’s massive temple complex in Robbinsville, New Jersey, had been recruited from India and subjected to forced labour, extremely low wages, long working hours, and restrictions on their freedom. Those allegations have been contested, and the legal history is more complicated than the initial headlines suggested. 

The Eiffel Tower episode is therefore not evidence that every aspect of BAPS is sinister, nor is it an indictment of Hinduism. It is something narrower, and arguably more revealing. It is a test of where religious accommodation ends and equal treatment begins. 

France has made its position unusually clear. Aurore Bergé, France’s equality minister, said that women should not be asked to erase themselves in the country and that no religious doctrine stands above the laws of the Republic. Paris officials have launched an investigation, while Eiffel Tower employees went on strike, forcing the landmark to close on Monday. 

There is an irony here that is difficult to miss. BAPS travelled to France to build a permanent symbol of Hindu faith and culture. At the Eiffel Tower, its visit instead became a reminder that cultural accommodation has limits. Those limits are simple enough: practise your faith freely, respect the faith of others, and do not make someone else’s gender the condition for being allowed to do their job. Even the most powerful religious institution should be able to live with that.