This week, the Eiffel Tower became the site of an unusual controversy. Following a visit by a large delegation linked to BAPS, the Hindu spiritual organisation that had just inaugurated a new temple in Paris, staff at the monument went on strike. Some staff and their union alleged that female colleagues had been moved off their posts during the visit. The tower closed for a day. SETE, the company that operates the tower, told the press that a request had been made to limit “interactions with women,” and said such a request should never have been accommodated.
In its own statement, BAPS said the arrangement was never intended as a request rooted in gender, and that any suggestion to the contrary does not reflect its values or the delegation’s intent. BAPS also said that, to its knowledge, no visitor or staff member was denied access to the monument at any point. Photographs from the visit show women present throughout, which sits uneasily alongside some of the more dramatic language used in earlier coverage. What exactly was requested, by whom, and why, remains unclear. What’s already clear is how quickly the story moved from an unverified allegation to a settled verdict on an entire religion.
Within days, a contested and still-unresolved incident had become, in a great deal of commentary, “proof” that Hinduism is a misogynistic religion, with the faith reduced to a single, misunderstood aspect of its monastic customs. That jump is worth pausing on, because it isn’t the first time something like it has happened.
A recurring pattern
For some time, a segment of commentators and media voices critical of Hindu institutions have advanced the argument that Hinduism is uniquely oppressive toward women. The Manusmriti, an ancient text with no binding authority in Hindu practice and one that most Hindus don’t reference in daily life, is often cited as though it were a functioning legal code, with some of its conveniently selected half verses presented out of context as the religion’s operating instructions. The reform movements within Hinduism, the enormous diversity of practice across regions and sects, and the absence of any central authority that could issue such a code in the first place, tend not to make it into these accounts.
A similar pattern shows up whenever a Hindu institution is at the centre of a story that can be easily misdescribed. A monastic order’s vow of celibacy, a practice common to renunciate traditions across several religions, is read as evidence of institutional misogyny once a Hindu order is involved. And once a strong, simple version of events gets ahead of the facts, corrections and rebuttals rarely travel as far as the original claim. In this case, headlines describing women being “hidden” spread widely well before BAPS’ response, or the photographs contradicting that framing, reached a comparable audience.
None of this means Hindu institutions (or any other) should be shielded from scrutiny, or that fair questions about how a religious delegation’s customs were accommodated by a public monument shouldn’t be asked. They should. But there’s an important difference between “this specific, disputed incident deserves proper scrutiny before conclusions are drawn” and “this proves something about a religious tradition followed by 1.2 billion people.” Much of the commentary over the past week has moved straight to the second position, treating one contested account, from one side of a labour dispute, as an established fact about an entire faith.
Not a uniquely Hindu practice
It’s also worth noting that strict rules around gender interaction and physical proximity are not unique to Hindu monastic orders. Haredi Orthodox Jewish practice includes well-documented norms around limited physical contact and interaction between men and women who are not immediate family. Certain monastic orders within Theravada Buddhism observe comparable restrictions between monks and women, rooted in centuries-old vinaya codes. Traditional Catholic cloistered orders have historically maintained strict separation from the opposite sex as part of their vows. None of these practices tend to generate the same kind of sweeping claims about the religion as a whole that Hindu institutions face when a similar custom becomes public.
This points to something worth naming directly: an asymmetry in how these stories get covered and how long the resulting impressions last. An initial, dramatic claim, such as women being “hidden” from a delegation, spreads quickly and widely, often before anyone has confirmed the underlying facts. The clarifications that follow, whether those are photographs showing women present throughout the visit or an organisation’s own statement explaining its intent, rarely reach the same audience or generate the same volume of coverage. The correction exists, but it doesn’t travel. What’s left in most people’s minds is the first version of the story, not the fuller one. Over time, this asymmetry does real work: it’s how a single disputed incident, whatever actually happened, ends up hardening into “evidence” for a broader and much less defensible claim about an entire religious tradition.
Getting the response right
It’s understandable that many people, including Hindus, reacted strongly to early reports of the story. Nobody wants to see any workplace mistreat its female staff, and if any part of these allegations holds up, that deserves a clear and honest reckoning. But this episode is also a useful reminder of the value of waiting for a fuller picture before reaching for the most damning interpretation available, particularly when the underlying claim maps so neatly onto an existing and contested narrative about the religion as a whole.
Religious practices, institutions and leaders should be discussed, debated and scrutinised. That kind of accountability is healthy. But there’s a difference between holding an institution accountable and treating an unverified claim as a chance to settle a broader argument about Hinduism itself. The more useful response, for anyone genuinely interested in getting this right, is to ask what actually happened, rather than reaching for the version of the story that fits most easily into a pre-existing case against Hinduism.
