Eiffel Tower Reopens After City Hall Apology, BAPS 'Keep Women Away’ Fiasco to be Investigated
New Delhi: There will be an investigation in France by the Société d'Exploitation de la tour Eiffel (SETE), the public-owned company that runs the Eiffel Tower day to day, into how the Gujarat-based Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha (BAPS) was allowed to "sideline" women during a recent visit by a BAPS team of around 100 members.
Ariel Weil, president of SETE, has said an internal investigation will determine who was responsible for putting the conditions in place and ensure it "never happens again", reports BBC.
Weil also blamed its managers for being "a bit overzealous" in complying with the request without considering whether it was "inappropriate", the BBC report said.
BAPS issued a qualified apology over the Eiffel Tower fiasco on Tuesday on its French X account, saying it considers the issue serious but not acknowleding that it or the delegation wanted women to not be seen but saying it was sorry if anyone was hurt or offended.
“To our knowledge, nobody was refused access to the Eiffel Tower at any moment. Nevertheless, we offer our sincere apologies to anyone who may have been hurt or offended by this situation,” it wrote in a statement on X.
SETE has acknowledged that the BAPS delegation, or someone in it, wanted women to be kept away from the site and that it disagreed with the segregation and erasure of women, says the Guardian report.
"They [the conditions BAPS was allowed to impose] are not in keeping with SETE’s values or the principles of equality between women and men and the neutrality that must guide the organisation of visits to the monument,” SETE previously said.
Weil is an elected mayor of the Paris Centre district and will be part of the investigation. He has said he was unaware of the “shocking and unacceptable” conditions allowed to the visiting group and did not agree with them.
The mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, who backed the striking Eiffel Tower staff, has acknowledged something went wrong during the BAPS delegation's visit. “These are not my values nor those the Eiffel Tower must represent,” he wrote on X.
In a statement issued a day after the visit of BAPS delegation, Eiffel Tower staff had said they objected to “professional instructions that led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex”.
Euronews reported quoted Diane Davoine, a union representative at the landmark, as having said that women workers had been “moved away from their workstations as the delegation passed by” during the BAPS visit.
A statement issued by staff said that they were shocked to be put in such a situation, adding:
“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.”
They also wrote:
“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.”
French equality minister Aurore Bergé also joined Grégorie to write on X, “In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves. No dogma, no religion is above the laws of the Republic.”
Far-right leader Marine Le Pen and former prime minister Gabriel Attal wrote similar comments on X. Le Pen, a frontrunner to run the country, wrote: “In France, we will never accept that the presence of women be “limited". All light must be shed on what happened during this visit to the Eiffel Tower, she wrote.
"In France, no culture, no belief, no worship, nothing nor anyone can come to dictate to women their place," Attal wrote.
BBC also reports Yaël Braun-Pivet, the president of France's National Assembly, as saying, "I refuse to allow women to be compelled to step aside in order to meet the demands of foreign visitors."
BAPS members were in Paris to inaugurate a temple of the sect, led by Mahant Swami Maharaj, the current chief of the sect.
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