Ask poor Luizinho Faleiro, Goa's erstwhile chief minister, what this is all about. When 11 of his colleagues, armed with ministerial promises from the rebel leader, walked out on him and headed for a hotel in Kolhapur, he suddenly found his five-month-old Congress government collapsing over him.

He had little choice but to resign, as he did on Wednesday, and the governance of the benighted state was once again held ransom to the politics of blackmail. Note that there are no ideological issues at stake here, only those of self-aggrandizement. It is not a love for the state or its people that provoked the rebellion, just a love of self. Goa's rebel leader, Francisco Sardinha, proved this when he showed that he had no compunctions in aligning with his party's arch political opponent, the BJP, to catapult himself into the chief minister's chair.

In case there is the mistaken assumption that this tableau of coming and going is a uniquely Goan pastime, the recent events in Uttar Pradesh clarify things a great deal. Here too the recently installed chief minister of the state, Ram Prakash Gupta, has had to wrestle with jumbo-sized ambitions.

Just last week, even after he had accommodated every one from predecessor Kalyan Singh's cabinet in a bid to win some stability for his government, he found that trying to please everybody was a mug's game. A day after the distribution of portfolios, ministers from the Loktantrik Congress and the Kisan Mazdoor BSP as well as some others refused to attend a scheduled Cabinet meeting and assume their new assignments because they believed that they were cheated out of the more attractive portfolios. The Delhi assembly too has witnessed a similar unseemly jostling for ministerships, regardless of whether it is the Congress that was in power, or the BJP.

Such behaviour smacks of cynicism of a very high order. The people of these states have not voted in their representatives only in order that these men and women go on to become ministers and get to ride in white cars with red lights. They have been voted to power to work sincerely for the interests of the people and the state and this certainly cannot be served by the back-stabbing and wheeling and dealing that goes on in the name of governance. The Goa story makes it even more imperative that the nation review the provisions of anti-defection legislation and ensure that those who break away from the party with a view to climb to positions of power themselves are forced to go back to the electorate for a fresh mandate.