Full and Equal Membership

If you have ever travelled in a crowded railway compartment or bus, you will recognise a familiar pattern: people who were themselves fighting to get in a moment ago, once inside, discover a shared interest in keeping others out. A line quickly forms between 'insiders' and 'outsiders', with outsiders seen as a threat. The same thing happens, from time to time, in cities, regions, or even a whole nation. When jobs, facilities like healthcare or education, or natural resources like land or water are limited, demands can arise to restrict entry even to people who are, on paper, fellow citizens — the 'Mumbai for Mumbaikars' slogan is one well-known Indian example of this feeling, and similar movements have occurred in many parts of India and the world.

This raises the real question behind 'full and equal membership': does it mean citizens should be able to enjoy equal rights and opportunities wherever in the country they choose to live, study, or work? Does it mean that every citizen, rich or poor, should be entitled to certain basic rights and facilities?

One of the rights granted to citizens in most democracies is freedom of movement, which matters especially to workers. Labour tends to migrate wherever jobs are available — I.T. workers may move to cities like Bangalore, nurses from Kerala can be found working all over the country, and the construction and infrastructure industries draw workers from many different regions. But resistance to this often builds up among local people, especially when jobs go to outsiders at lower wages, or when political parties take up demands to reserve jobs for those who belong to the state or know the local language; in the worst cases, resistance has taken the form of organised violence against 'outsiders'. Skilled and educated migrants are often welcomed for the abilities they bring, while poorer, unskilled migrants are frequently viewed less warmly by local residents worried about competition for scarce jobs — raising the genuine question of whether poor and unskilled workers should enjoy the same right to live and work anywhere in the country as skilled workers do.

A memorable illustration of just how much ordinary city life quietly depends on migrant labour imagines a single day in the life of an urban middle-class Indian household with no immigrant or migrant workers around at all — no help with cooking, no domestic help, no drivers, no delivery workers, no one to clean, mind children, or run small errands. The everyday chaos this produces makes a simple point in a memorable way: migrant workers are not outsiders taking something away from a city — they are woven into the fabric of local economic and household life, often invisibly.

Citizenship, however, is about more than the relationship between states and their members. It is also about citizen-citizen relations, and involves obligations of citizens to one another and to society — not only the legal obligations states impose, but also a moral obligation to participate in, and contribute to, the shared life of the community. Citizens are also considered to be the inheritors and trustees of a country's culture and natural resources.

Disputes over these questions do arise, even in democratic societies, and a basic principle of democracy is that such disputes should be settled through negotiation and discussion rather than force — citizens are free to try and influence public opinion and government policy by forming groups, holding demonstrations, using the media, appealing to political parties, or approaching the courts. This may be a slow process, but if the guiding principle of full and equal membership for all citizens is kept in mind, it becomes possible to work toward acceptable solutions — and doing so is itself one of the obligations of citizenship. …