Crisis management, Ruchika case| Cathnews India

Published Date: March 18, 2010

Tags: Church communication, Church in India, crisis management

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Indian Church needs to develop a professional approach to crisis management and crisis communication, writes Allwyn Fernandes, a senior journalist, while analyzing how the Church managed the Ruchika case of Chandigarh.

Untrained spokespersons for the Church said all the wrong things when approached by the media about the Ruchika case, says Fernandes, who has been involved for the past 15 years in crisis management. The following excerpts are from his column appeared in the February issue of Companion, a Church publication.

The weeks since December 21, 2009 have been one of huge embarrassment for Catholics in India. A powerful former Director-General of Police (DGP) of the northern state of Haryana was finally convicted of molesting a motherless 14-year-old girl, Ruchika Girhotra, in 1990 in Chandigarh, the state capital, not a remote village.

Justice caught up with DGP S.S. Rathore (67) even though the police, instead of moving against him for molesting Ruchika, chose to hound her family instead. This resulted in his child victim committing suicide out of frustration three years after the incident.

Where does the Catholic Church, which has raised the banner of justice for itself and for the disadvantaged and underprivileged in society, come into all this? Sad to say, within a month of Ruchika making her allegation against Rathore on August 12, 1990, she was out of the Sacred Heart School in Chandigarh run by nuns from a Catholic religious order.

Changing versions

It then emerged that the nun who was principal in 1990 is still head of the institution. The nuns now came up with explanations like “she did not pay her fees”, “she was not expelled, her parents withdrew her from school…she simply stopped coming…”

Given the influence and power that Rathore wielded to get Ruchika to withdraw the charge against him, it is difficult to believe that he did not have a hand in her removal from the school. This view gathered momentum after it emerged that Rathore’s daughter was in the same class as Ruchika — it had therefore become embarrassing for her to sit in the same class as her father’s accuser.

On January 7, 2010 a magisterial probe ordered found here was an external influence in the action against Ruchika,” a government official said.

Even after the magisterial inquiry concluded that there was “outside compelling influence” behind Ruchika’s expulsion, the church’s local spokesperson was quoted as saying: “The school is innocent… No one pressurised the school. I will always stand by the statement I made.”

This situation could have been avoided with a professional approach to crisis management and crisis communication. The Church needs a crisis management infrastructure built into the system at the national, regional and diocesan levels. We need to track issues and incidents on a continuing basis, identify those with a potential to escalate into a crisis and take necessary steps speedily to contain the damage. This is known to communications professionals as Issues Identification and Issues Management.

Professional approach is key

We need crisis management teams (CMTs) comprising lay professionals (a lawyer, a medical person, other experts in their respective fields) in each diocese and at the regional centres, as well as at the national level at the CBCI, with the necessary authority to guide and help each other across diocesan lines in a spirit of interdependence. And we need well trained spokespersons across India, at least 250 of them, capable of handling aggressive media with their own agendas. In a boundaryless world, the Church cannot afford to be compartmentalized into diocesan territories. It needs interconnectivity and interdependence because in a world of global communications.

If the Chandigarh diocese and the CBCI headquarters in Delhi had professionally-run crisis management teams, the respective official spokespersons for the church in India would have realized the danger to the reputation of Sacred Heart School/Church, worked the phone lines to the congregation running the institution, tracked down the principal and other nuns/teachers at the school in 1990 and established the facts within hours of the police officer being convicted.

Either we tell people what we know to be the truth in the best way possible – or we let them drag it out of us, inch by inch, kicking and screaming, making us look more like partners-in-crime with Rathore. In the end, the way we handled it, this is what happened.

Sadly, the principal failed – not so much in 1990, but in December 2009 when she could have stood with the larger Church behind her and closed the chapter. And with her failed the Church in Chandigarh and in Delhi. That is the larger failure that demands our attention.

Source: Companion

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