15 Q uentin Tarantino’s Second World War fantasy, Inglourious Basterds, features a taut scene in the beginning where the antagonist, SS Colonel Hans Landa—a Nazi detective on the lookout for fugitive Jews—interrogates a French farmer, Pierre LaPadite. The scene isn’t a classic ‘interrogation’ with violence and open intimidation, but one where Landa slowly and methodically extracts from LaPadite the exact location of where the Jews are hiding in his house. During this back and forth, Landa compares Jews, as Nazis were wont to do, to rats, but surprisingly proclaims that he does not see the comparison as an insult. Landa points out that a rat must survive in a hostile world not of its making, earning hatred for no obvious reason. He gets LaPadite to admit that humanity has learnt to despise rats for no reason even as other rodents, such as squirrels, capable of just as much harm, earn nowhere near enough hatred. In this exchange, Tarantino (also the writer) unearths something deeply unsettling about political arrangements that find an echo in the writings of a hugely controversial German political philosopher and constitutional theorist, Carl Schmitt. What Tarantino, through Landa, seems to say is that the irrational hatred of the ‘other’ is not limited to just the Jews of Europe in pre-World War II days—it seems to be something fundamental to human society that can get a ‘Jew hunter’ to agree with someone who is a sympathiser. This worldview seems to echo (if not directly inspired by) Schmitt’s thesis that all politics is about identifying an ‘enemy’—those who are distinguishable from ‘the people’—and that constitutional arrangements, including institutions of liberal democracy, can only ever serve the needs of ‘the people’. The identification of the ALOK PRASANNA KUMAR FRIEND NOT FOE Popular Sovereignty in the Indian Constitution Winter 2021–Spring 2022, Volume 48, Numbers 3 & 4 03_IIC Q_WS_2021-22_Alok Prasanna Kumar-final.indd 15 03_IIC Q_WS_2021-22_Alok Prasanna Kumar-final.indd 15 24-06-2022 20:59:57 24-06-2022 20:59:57