The temporary shutdown of the Eiffel Tower after workers struck over the sidelining of female staff during a visit by a delegation from the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) has sparked a fierce transnational debate. At its heart lies an uncomfortable question: when ancient ascetic strictures leave cloistered temples and enter shared global civic spaces, whose rules prevail—the sanctuary of the monk or the secular right of the worker?
From Private Discipline to Public Demand
The strict monastic codes governing BAPS sadhus reach back to the early 19th century and the foundational texts of the Swaminarayan tradition, including the Shikshapatri written by Bhagwan Swaminarayan. Crafted to preserve absolute celibacy (naisthik brahmacharya), these rules forbid initiated monks from touching, conversing unnecessarily with, or remaining in close proximity to women.
Historically, this radical separation served as an internal spiritual discipline reserved for renunciates who had severed worldly ties in pursuit of salvation. It was never meant as a societal blueprint for the laity, nor as a mandate imposed on the outside world. Yet when a modern global delegation—comprising both monks and lay followers—enters a major secular monument, treating these monastic boundaries as portable barriers produces immediate structural friction. A religious rule designed to protect an individual monk’s inner purity abruptly becomes an external demand that reorganizes the civic environment.
France’s Unyielding Reply
French authorities reacted swiftly, uncompromisingly, and in full alignment with the republic’s commitment to gender equality. After trade-union representatives reported that female employees had been made “invisible” or replaced by male counterparts, Paris city officials and municipal leaders opened a formal inquiry into the operational directives issued by management.
Ariel Weil, president of the operating company SETE and mayor of Paris Centre, called compliance with such requests “totally shocking and unacceptable,” conceding that management had been overzealous in accommodating conditions that should never have been entertained. France’s Equality Minister Aurore Bergé reinforced the point: no religious dogma supersedes the laws of the Republic, and women will not be asked to step aside or erase themselves in public life. Although BAPS issued an apology and clarified that access was never officially denied to anyone, the institutional miscalculation had already exposed the fault lines of cultural accommodation.
The Proper Burden of Belief
The fundamental failure in Paris was a profound inversion of responsibility. When a religious order maintains an internal code that requires complete avoidance of half the human population, the burden of compliance must rest solely on the adherent—never on the innocent bystander or public employee.
Demanding that female security personnel, ticket agents, or hosts abandon their workstations, hide in back rooms, or be swapped for male colleagues is not an accommodation of religious freedom; it is the outsourcing of discrimination onto the public payroll. It converts a monastic vulnerability into a civic imposition. If BAPS swamis discover that the modern world is populated by competent, visible, working women—and that their vows cannot withstand contact with a secular, co-educational reality—the remedy is not to render women invisible. The remedy is for the swamis to forgo spaces where civic equality is non-negotiable.
A secular public square rests on the premise that every citizen possesses equal dignity and an unalienable right to their workplace.
Faith does not end when temple doors close, yet neither does the law of the land halt at the foot of a national monument. When the two collide, the state must ensure that accommodation never becomes capitulation, and that no traveller’s
salvation is purchased at the price of a citizen’s erasure.
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai….
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.
