The French are accustomed to rancorous debates about the threat to women’s rights posed by religious orthodoxies – especially Islam, with its restrictive tradition of hijabs, burkas and abayas to cover the female body.
Only last week, France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen, who is far ahead in the polls, declared that she will make illegal Islamic headscarves worn in public. The far left, which panders to the Muslim vote, shot back with a promise to repeal the ban on abayas in French schools.
This week, few in France were expecting a scandal over religion and women’s rights that has nothing to do with Islam. But the arrival of a 92-year-old guru of an ultra-conservative Hindu sect took enforced invisibility of women to a whole new level – in fact, to the top level of the Eiffel Tower with its magnificent views of the City of Light.
Mahant Swami Maharaj, spiritual leader of the sect known as Baps (Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha) was visiting Paris to inaugurate a new Hindu temple just east of Paris, near Disneyland. Women and men are segregated in these Hindu temples, and priests can have no interactions with women. The aged guru, evidently a keen tourist, wished to visit the Eiffel Tower on his visit to the French capital. His Hindu delegation therefore issued instructions for all female Eiffel Tower staff to be out of sight.
Astoundingly, the Eiffel Tower complied with this stipulation and removed female staff so Mahant Swami Maharaj would not lay eyes on them. When the labor union representing Eiffel Tower workers learned of this, the staff walked out on strike. The world’s most famous monument was shut down. Tourists hoping to visit the Eiffel Tower were turned away.
The scandal provoked by the improbable character of Mahant Swami Maharaj (his birth name is Vinu Patel) has provoked a storm of shock and indignation. The French media are buzzing round-the-clock about the Eiffel Tower scandal. Every commentator has a view on the affair. The international media are covering the controversy like an enormous cock-up.
French politicians from left and right, showing uncharacteristic solidarity, have rallied in a consensus against religious dogma restricting the rights of women. Former prime minister Gabriel Attal, who is running for the French presidency, issued a statement: “In France, no culture, no belief, no worship, nothing nor anyone can come to dictate to women their place.” While far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon observed a tactical silence on the issue, other politicians in his camp called the Eiffel Tower’s conduct “totally unacceptable.” On the far right, Marine Le Pen declared that “we will never accept the presence of women to be limited.”
The scandal that has erupted over this bizarre incident has been painfully embarrassing for everyone involved. In the firing line is the city of Paris, which owns and operates the Eiffel Tower. Socialist mayor Emmanuel Grégoire, caught off guard by the furor, immediately announced an investigation. The corporation that manages the Eiffel Tower is headed by one of Grégoire’s political allies, Ariel Weil, local mayor of the city’s central arrondissements. Weil has been ducking the issue and blaming lower-level staff at the Eiffel Tower. Everyone is in damage-control mode. Who gave orders to remove female staff at the monument remains a mystery.
The scandal is also an embarrassment for the French state, whose laws enforce equality between the sexes. Violating women’s rights in capitulation to religious dogma is moreover an affront to the French Republic’s values of “laïcité” that restrict the encroachment of religion into public institutions and civil society more broadly. The symbolism of the Eiffel Tower makes this shambolic affair particularly humiliating. The tower was constructed in 1889 during the fiercely secularist Third Republic as the centerpiece at the Exposition Universelle celebrating the centenary of the French Revolution. The French Republic recognizes freedom of worship, but the intrusion of religious strictures and symbols into the public sphere is increasingly controversial. Marine Le Pen’s promise to make wearing Islamic headscarves illegal is a response to these concerns.
Finally, the Eiffel Tower scandal is an embarrassment for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist movement enjoys the support of guru Mahant Swami Maharaj and his ultra-conservative sect whose massive financial resources come from its adherents from the banking and merchant caste. The sect has constructed Hindu temples not only throughout India but also globally – including in the United States, Britain and now in France. In the US, the sect was accused of human trafficking and exploitation of low-caste Indian workers in the construction of a massive temple inaugurated three years ago in New Jersey.
For Narendra Modi, the sect’s expansion internationally boosts India’s soft power. The construction of the temple near Paris was promoted as a sign of positive cultural relations between France and India. Modi officially inaugurated the temple in a remote address to worshipers. “Today, when such a grand temple has been built in France, it will enrich France’s diversity and will energize the cultural relations between India and France,” Modi said over the weekend in his video message.
Now the scandal over the Hindu guru’s visit to the Eiffel Tower has turned the temple’s inauguration into a diplomatic disaster. A student group in France called Indian Alliance Paris issued a statement denouncing the Hindu sect: “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.”
There will undoubtedly be political winners and losers from the fallout
The Eiffel Tower, meanwhile, has reopened to tourists, but many in France want to know how this fiasco happened in the first place. Was the Eiffel Tower’s shocking acquiescence to the demands of an obscure Hindu guru a lower-level blunder, or did orders come from above? There seems to be little doubt that French officials rolled out the red carpet for the Hindu sect for the inauguration of their temple on the outskirts of Paris.
With a French presidential election on the horizon next spring, there will undoubtedly be political winners and losers from the fallout. While the controversy, on the surface, is about an obscure Hindu guru, it will be understood in the context of other orthodox religions wanting to render women invisible – it will be associated with Islam. This makes the obvious beneficiary Marine Le Pen, whose hardline position against Islamic veils and headscarves resonates with French voters.
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