Who are the Hindu group cited in Eiffel Tower staff walk out?

The Eiffel Tower here in Paris was reopened today after being shut amid a walkout by staff. That walkout was prompted by a management decision to keep female employees out of sight during a visit by a religious delegation from India over the weekend. The request having been made by the delegation, the move triggering an angry response from staff, but now the management saying it's regretting the accepting conditions of the private visit. For more on this story, I'm joined by France 24's Delano D'Souza. So what actually happened on Saturday, Delano? Hi Annette, good to see you. Well, a delegation from the Hindu religious group, the sect BAPS, were visiting the monument, France's most visited monument. Now they were in the country to inaugurate France's first Hindu temple, which is located on the outskirts of Paris. Now, female staff at the Eiffel Tower who work at various things like the gift shop, for instance, were told to make themselves scarce. Some even had to go into offices. Crazy, I know. This obviously ruffled feathers with all the staff, which led to that one-day strike, which we saw on Monday. Now, Valérie Pécresse, who is the president of the greater Paris region, put out, she herself was at one of the inauguration events for this temple in question, and she put out a statement on X, where she said she was shocked to learn that during the visit to the Eiffel Tower, organized by Atout France, a Hindu delegation, including religious figures, requested that female employees be kept out of their path. Now, I contacted Atout France, which is basically the French tourism development agency, and they said they had nothing to do with the visit. I contacted their India office as well as their Paris office, and they said they don't know why she said that they were involved in planning this visit. Now, the Indian embassy, too, said they had nothing to do with this visit. So, it's terrible PR for this Hindu temple, which has just been inaugurated just a couple of days ago. But why was the demand made? Well, the BAP sect, which is based in Gujarat, and that has very deep pockets. Now, they're known for building temples all around the world, in the Middle East, in Europe, North America, what have you. BAPS has links to Hindu nationalist groups in India and is guided by a guru who's in his 90s, 92, 93 years old, I believe, and he refuses to be in the presence of women. Now, BAPS has put out a statement, which I can read to you, where they essentially say, to our knowledge, no visitor or member of staff was denied access to the monument at any point during our visit. They don't explicitly say that no request was made to keep female staff away. But whatever happened, management at the Eiffel Tower complied on that. And this is the crux of the problem. We do have political figures here in France who have, of course, come out and condemned what happened to female staff at the Eiffel Tower. Former French president and current member of We do not ask women to step aside to satisfy religious demands. Equality between women and men is a fundamental achievement of our republic. We also have Marine Le Pen, who is the lead candidate for next year's presidential election, the far-right leader saying, in France, we will never accept that the presence of women be limited. So we are having reactions coming into this story. We also have a couple of interesting opinion pieces from French media saying, why did France roll out the red carpet to this organization, this sect, here in France?