Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh at the launch of a transmission system of the Power Grid Corporation of India in New Delhi on Wednesday. (PTI)

New Delhi, March 29: As the Centre mulls a bill to clear up the office-of-profit muddle, it faces several tricky issues, legislative and political.

Is it enough to enlarge the exempt list or is a clear definition necessary? Or should Parliament go to the root of the problem and strike off the clause disqualifying MPs if they hold such offices?

The Prime Minister, asked if there was a proposal to do away with the clause, told reporters: “These are all the issues which will have to be examined?. We have not reached any definite conclusions.”

As the cabinet committee on parliamentary affairs prepares to meet tomorrow to consider a date for the special House session to discuss and amend the law, government sources cited some of these “problematic” areas:

• Article 102 (1) (a) of the Constitution disqualifies MPs if they hold any office of profit under the central or state governments except those listed in the Parliament (Prevention of Disqualification) Act, 1959. One solution is to enlarge the list

• Yet, the 1959 law is silent on what an office of profit is; it only lists 10 offices exempt from the tag. Many are asking how the lawmakers can, without a clear definition, possibly decide which additional offices should be included. So, one view is that the Constitution itself should be amended, instead of the 1959 law, to define the term

• Some others, however, doubt if the government should tie itself up in definitions at a time when politics is in flux and demands fresh and often “creative” responses to changing situations

• A proposal for a blanket ban on lawmakers holding any parallel office ? of profit or not ? was shot down after the BJP and the Left reportedly opposed it. Ban opponents argued that the restriction on the size of ministries (10 per cent of House strength ? 12 per cent for smaller states) posed a “special” problem when a coalition had to be cobbled together and the “loaves of power” doled out among many hopefuls.

“The only answer is making the members the heads of corporations and statutory bodies,” a source said

• There was a suggestion that only Parliament, and not the President or Election Commission, should have the power to disqualify MPs. The Left apparently pushed for this but the Prime Minister and his Congress colleagues weren’t interested.

“It would seem as though the government was undermining two important institutions. We don’t want a confrontation with either,” a source said

• For the Congress, there was the “special case” of the National Advisory Council (NAC), which Sonia Gandhi headed till her resignation last week. The party says it wasn’t an office of profit, but three senior cabinet ministers conceded they were “unsure” of what the poll panel’s opinion would be on this

Some in the ruling coalition, including Raghuvansh Prasad Singh and Ram Vilas Paswan, want the council ? the focus of the recent controversy ? dissolved instead of being put on the exempt list.

But others say that when Sonia leads the next Lok Sabha campaign ? focusing on the government’s social sector schemes ? it would be useful if voters remembered that it was she who had piloted the pro-poor measures. For that, the NAC needs to continue.