Q.Citizenship as full and equal membership involves rights and obligations. Which rights could citizens expect in most democratic states today? What obligations to state/fellow citizens?

'Full and equal membership' sounds simple, but working out what it actually means in practice raises real questions. A useful way in is the insider/outsider pattern: people fighting to get onto a crowded bus or train, once inside, often develop a shared interest in keeping others out — and the same pattern shows up at the level of cities, regions, or a whole nation whenever jobs, land, water, or other resources are scarce (the 'Mumbai for Mumbaikars' slogan is a well-known Indian example). This raises the question of whether full and equal membership means every citizen — wherever they are from within the country — should be able to enjoy equal rights and opportunities wherever they choose to live, study, or work.

Freedom of movement is one of the rights citizens have in most democracies, and it matters especially to workers, since labour tends to migrate to wherever jobs exist (I.T. workers moving to cities like Bangalore, nurses from Kerala working across the country, construction workers following infrastructure projects). But this movement is often resisted by local populations — over jobs going to 'outsiders' at lower wages, demands to reserve jobs for people who belong to the state or speak the local language, and in the worst cases, organised violence against migrants. Society also tends to respond very differently to poor, unskilled migrants than to skilled ones — raising the genuine question of whether poor workers deserve the same right to live and work anywhere as skilled, educated workers already enjoy.

Full and equal membership isn't only about rights, though — it also comes with obligations: not just the legal duties a state imposes, but a moral obligation to participate in and contribute to the shared life of the community, since citizens are considered to be the inheritors and trustees of a country's culture and natural resources. When disagreements over these questions arise even in a democracy, the basic democratic principle is that they should be resolved through negotiation and discussion — via groups, protest, the media, political parties, or the courts — rather than through force; settling disputes this way is itself one of the obligations that comes with citizenship.

A historical example that shows what a struggle for full and equal membership looks like from the outside is the US Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s, which fought Segregation Laws that denied Black Americans equal treatment. Martin Luther King Jr. argued every person has equal human worth regardless of race, that segregation was a deep psychological wound on those who suffered it, that it damaged the whole community (not only the segregated group), and that it built artificial barriers that stopped people cooperating for the common good — and he called for these unjust laws to be resisted through peaceful, non-violent protest rather than physical violence.