BAPS: The Hindu organisation at the heart of Modi’s cultural diplomacy | LME 163 | Pooja Prasanna

“Strike and closure of the Eiffel Tower after the expulsion of female staff during a visit by a Hindu delegation”

This was what a prominent French newspaper said on September 7 this year. 

The Hindu delegation belonged to the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha or the BAPS and it made global headlines  

But the interesting question is not just what happened in Paris.

It is this: how did a religious organisation with deeply conservative internal rules become one of the most powerful global faces of Indian culture?

BAPS has spectacular temples, a wealthy and influential global following, a vast charity network and an extraordinary relationship with Narendra Modi.

It also has a much more complicated history involving women, caste, labour and political power.

So who exactly is BAPS? And why has the Indian state invested so heavily in projecting it around the world?

Let Me Explain

What happened in France

BAPS, that booked a private tour of the Eiffel tower, is a multi-million-dollar global Hindu sect rooted in Gujarat.

Accompanying the delegation were its sadhus, or monks, who take an absolute vow of celibacy. Under their rules, these monks must never touch, speak to, look at, or stand in the presence of a woman.

To accommodate this rule, management instructed female staff to step aside 

The French staff union pushed back hard.

BAPS apologized to anyone “hurt or inconvenienced,” while insisting no one was denied access.

But the damage was done.

And French newspapers began asking a question that is rarely asked with the same intensity in India:

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Who exactly is BAPS?

Because this was not simply a disagreement over a private religious event.

It was a moment when the internal rules of a powerful religious organisation collided with the principles of a secular public institution.

And to understand why that matters, we need to understand what BAPS actually is.

Who is BAPS, really?

To the casual observer in London, Chicago, Abu Dhabi or Paris, BAPS looks like an impressive, peaceful non-profit.

It builds intricately carved stone temples and mega-complexes known as Akshardhams, using Rajasthan sandstone and Italian marble. 

Through BAPS Charities, it also runs disaster relief, blood donation drives and vegetarian food festivals.

The organisation was formally established in 1907 by Shastriji Maharaj, following a theological split within the older Swaminarayan movement.

It is a highly centralised religious structure, with enormous authority vested in its spiritual leadership.

The organisation has an estimated 1.5 million followers, many of them part of the prosperous Gujarati diaspora.

But BAPS is not just a network of temples.

It is also a powerful social institution, a financial network and a community organisation.

And that is where the story gets more interesting.

Economic monopoly, political clout, and the Modi factor

To understand BAPS’s reach today, you have to look at Gujarat, where its influence runs deep across business, society and politics.

BAPS did not begin as an elite network. It initially mobilised working-class communities, rural farmers and middle-caste groups.

A major turning point was its adoption by the Patidar community.

As sections of the Patidar community moved from agriculture into trade, manufacturing, medicine and real estate, BAPS grew alongside them.

The organisation became a powerful source of community identity and social trust.

Journalists I spoke to in Gujarat described what they called a closed economic ecosystem.

Preferential patronage: let me give you an example. If a contractor or developer was a BAPS follower, or satsangi, they would often prefer to buy materials such as cement, sand and steel from fellow followers, even when those materials cost more.

Hiring networks: Jobs, sub-contracts and business deals could also move within the satsangis.

The result was a cycle in which religious loyalty and commercial success reinforced each other.

In Gujarat, religious influence and political influence have rarely existed in separate worlds.

Long before Narendra Modi became Prime Minister, Congress politicians routinely sought the blessings of BAPS leadership to secure votes, support and funding.

Across party lines, maintaining a relationship with BAPS was considered politically important.

But its relationship with Narendra Modi transformed the organisation’s reach.

In the early 1980s, Modi was an RSS pracharak in Gujarat when he met Pramukh Swami Maharaj, BAPS’s late spiritual head.

Modi has repeatedly described Pramukh Swami as his spiritual mentor and even as a father figure.

Their relationship was deeply personal and symbolic.

When Modi filed his nomination papers for his first election in Rajkot in 2002, Pramukh Swami sent him what BAPS followers call a sacred pen.

Modi has said he used that same pen for subsequent election nominations 

He has also publicly spoken about receiving fabric for a kurta-pyjama from Pramukh Swami for more than 40 consecutive years.

These may sound like personal anecdotes.

But they tell us something about the emotional and symbolic importance of this relationship.

In 2016, an idol of Lord Swaminarayan at a temple in Surat was dressed in a full RSS uniform, complete with khaki shorts, a white shirt and a black cap.

The image sparked a controversy over the overlap between the religious sect and Hindu nationalist ideology.

BAPS as India’s soft power

When Modi became Prime Minister in 2014, BAPS’s overseas expansion accelerated.

And Indian diplomatic machinery increasingly became part of that expansion.

In February 2024, Modi personally travelled to the UAE to inaugurate the massive BAPS Hindu temple in Abu Dhabi.

Diplomatic efforts had helped secure the land for the project.

And just a day before the Eiffel Tower controversy, Modi virtually inaugurated BAPS’s new temple near Paris, describing it as a milestone in India-France cultural relations.

Indian diplomats, including the Indian Ambassador to UNESCO, were actively involved in the temple’s realisation.

This is where the BAPS story moves beyond religion.

Political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot has pointed out that what makes BAPS unusual is the extent to which a private religious organisation has become integrated into India’s official diplomatic projection.

BAPS temples in London, Chicago and Paris are generally presented abroad as Hindu temples.

And that creates a problem. 

When BAPS is presented as a representative of Hindu civilisation, its practices can easily be mistaken for practices common to Hinduism as a whole.

The Eiffel Tower controversy is a perfect example.

The other criticism: Women, caste, and forced labor

Asking women employees to be invisible when its monks visit is not atypical for BAPS  

An institutionalized erasure of women

BAPS frames its monastic rules as spiritual discipline, but their real-world application is deeply patriarchal.

While BAPS runs a parallel women's wing, the Mahila Mandal, women remain excluded from institutional governance, spiritual leadership and financial decisions. They cannot speak to the guru or enter the core spaces.

This isn't confined to temple walls.

Journalists who have worked in Gujarat for decades described similar practices spilling over:

• Newsroom exclusions: In the 1990s and early 2000s, BAPS representatives visiting news organizations routinely demanded to interact only with male editors, sometimes skipping meetings when no male editor was available. Female employees were asked to leave the office until the BAPS representatives finished their walk-through.

• Press conference bans: Veteran reporters in Gujarat say female journalists were historically barred from attending BAPS press conferences.

Caste, court battles, and legal resistance

In 1966, followers of the Swaminarayan movement took a temple-entry case to India's Supreme Court, arguing that they were a distinct, non-Hindu faith.

They said they must be exempt from the Bombay Harijan Temple Entry Act, which required Hindu temples to admit Dalits.

A Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar rejected the argument, ruling that the sect was Hindu and legally bound to provide Dalits equal access to its temples.

The New Jersey forced labor lawsuit

The most severe hit to BAPS's global standing came in May 2021, when federal agents raided its 126-acre Akshardham site in New Jersey 

BAPS leadership was accused of human trafficking, forced labor and wage theft on behalf of nearly 200 Indian workers, mostly from marginalized Dalit and Adivasi communities in Rajasthan.

They said they were paid roughly $1.20 an hour for brutal 87-hour workweeks under hazardous conditions. There were more allegations at the time including that workers were confined to a compound. 

Federal prosecutors later closed a parallel criminal probe without formal charges, while the civil class-action lawsuit continued through the U.S. court system.

The Akshardham Temple built by the larger BAPS network on the Yamuna riverbank in New Delhi also faced scrutiny over construction on the fragile Yamuna floodplains.

The National Green Tribunal penalized the management in 2015 for expanding without prior environmental clearance.

When BAPS delegates walked up to the Eiffel Tower, they were looking for an iconic photo op—an image signaling their presence in the secular heart of Europe, near their new mega-temple.

Instead, they collided with France's secular republican values.

When an organization builds its authority on religious power, wealth and political patronage, it can eventually forget that the rest of the world doesn't operate by its rules.

The Eiffel Tower strike was a sharp, public reminder that it does not. 

Produced by Megha Mukundan, script by Pooja Prasanna, Camera by Akshay Lal, Edit by Nikhil Sekhar

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