Assaulted By Someone I Knew For My CAA Posts: Filmmaker Ronny Sen

He was attacked by a man with a dagger who was harassing him asking him to stop posting anti-CAA stuff.

Filmmaker and photgrapher from Kolkata, Ronny Sen, was attacked with a dagger on 30 December for his posts on social media criticising the CAA. Sen says that the person who attacked was a seemingly ordinary citizen who’d grown up in the same area where he’d grown up.

(Photo: Ishadrita Lahiri/The Quint)

Video Editor: Vivek Gupta

“He’d grown up in the same area I’d grown up. He wasn’t really a friend or an acquaintance but a “chena mukh” (known face)”, says Ronny Sen, filmmaker and photographer from Kolkata, while talking about the man who attacked him with a dagger on the night of 30 December.

The man had been trolling Sen on social media for a while now. But Sen didn’t imagine that it would come to this.

‘Blocked Him On Social Media’

“This guy started calling me out on Facebook many years back when there was a trend where people started calling other people anti-national and deshdrohi and all of that.”, said Sen speaking to The Quint at his Kolkata home.

I had blocked him, but I don’t know how, he was still seeing my posts. Suddenly on the night of 28 December, he called me and started abusing me”, he said.

Sen categorically told the man that he did not want to engage with him and that he should mind his own business. He, however, kept insisting that Sen should stop posting about the NRC.

Subsequently, the man seemed to calm down and asked Sen to meet him in the locality to sort things out. Sen obliged and reached the meeting spot with a couple of friends on the night of 30 December.

“While I was talking to him, I saw his hand reaching out to his back pocket. He then drew out a machete and tried attacking me.”

Ronny Sen to The Quint

Sen escaped unscathed due to intervention from those around him. He immediately filed an FIR and the man in question was arrested. However, he is now out on bail.

‘Vitriol Among Common People Is Shocking’

Sen says that the attack on him wasn’t an organised ‘political’ attack. He says that it just goes on to show how ordinary people are now being blinded by a false sense of nationalism, to the extent that they’re willing to resort to violence.

“The vitriol among common people is shocking”, Sen said.

“There is a pattern of these kind of attacks.  I’m the third person to be attacked in less than a week. There is a dangerous trend of attacks on people like us who have no affiliation to any sort of political organisation whatsoever. We’re just saying that we don’t support the NRC or the CAA or the NPR and the government just needs to scrap it. And it’s not only us. There are millions of people on the streets of India.”

Ronny Sen to The Quint

Narrating an incident to highlight his point, Sen recounted another incident.

“There was a day when I was talking to a friend over the phone on my balcony. This was right after the abrogation of Article 370 and I was criticising the move. Some man who was walking down the street in front of my house overheard my conversation and that abusing me and asking me to go to Pakistan and whatnot”, Sen says.

He added that while the state and country has seen several such protests, this personal targetting of individuals is a new trend.

“This is something that we have not seen before. My generation which grew up in Kolkata...we are what we are because of the protests which happened during Nandigram and Singur. What we saw then is a big reason for what we have become. During those protests, the CPM and the Left were in the government, but they did not attack individuals like this. They did not attack filmmakers. They did not attack writers, journalists.”

Ronny Sen to The Quint

“They want us to fear. They want us to not speak and this is something very, very scary”, he signs off.