The China Mail - Eiffel Tower closed in row over women removed for Hindu group

The visit came on the same day as a cultural boat procession on the Seine organised by the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) spiritual movement.

In a statement, Eiffel Tower staff condemned "professional instructions that led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex" during the visit by the delegation.

"Instructions were given to female employees of the Eiffel Tower and to female employees of contractors to make themselves invisible in order to welcome this delegation," the staff said in their statement, adding they were shocked to have been put in such a situation.

"Some were asked to leave their posts and withdraw to other areas. In some posts they were replaced by men. And all female employees were instructed not to go through or cross certain areas while the delegation was present."

The operating company that runs the Paris landmark, SETE, acknowledged that the Hindu delegation had requested the visit be organised so as to limit "interactions with women" and said that "these conditions should not have been accepted".

Tthe conditions "were not in line with SETE's values, nor with the principles of equality between men and women," the company said, promising to accept the "consequences".

"It is clearly not an acceptable practice," SETE president Ariel Weil, who is also a socialist elected official in Paris, told AFP.

"I restate the Eiffel Tower's commitment to republican values and to the equality of men and women."

The French capital's socialist mayor Emmanuel Gregoire said on X it was "unacceptable" that the Tower management agreed to the delegation's conditions, and said an investigation would be launched.

- Hindu nationalist ties -

The Tower, which receives nearly seven million visitors a year according to its website, was closed all day on Monday, but will open as normal on Tuesday according to a staff representative.

BAPS, which is close to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling conservative Hindu nationalist party, consecrated its first major temple in France on Sunday, near Paris.

French equality minister Aurore Berge reacted angrily on X.

"In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves. No dogma, no religion is above the laws of the Republic," she wrote.

Far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen also criticised the incident, saying France would "never accept that women's presence be 'limited'".

Gabriel Attal, a centrist rival to become president, said that "in France, no culture, no belief, no religion, nothing and no one can come and dictate to women what their place should be".

D.Peng--ThChM