As the Congress charged the Modi Government with running away from the Parliament and holding the session after the Gujarat polls, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu said on Saturday that it does not matter how many days Parliament sat but what matters is how many days it functioned.
The Congress criticism came a day after the government announced that that the Parliament session would be held from December 15 to January 5.
Attacking the Centre for convening the winter session of Parliament after polling is held in Gujarat, the Congress accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government of running away from scrutiny by lawmakers on several issues.
"We charge the Parliament and the government from running away from Parliamentary scrutiny before the elections in Gujarat," Congress leader Anand Sharma told reporters here.
Sharma said the opposition would take up issues such as the "imposition of a wrong GST" on people and the Rafale deal among others in the Parliament.
Speaking at a literary festival here, Naidu said that the debate on the freedom of speech and expression should go on.
"How many days the Parliament sat doesn't matter, what matters is how many days it functioned," he said.
Naidu said that the philosophy of life should revolve around "character, calibre, compassion and conduct and not caste, community and cash".
"From Kalidasa to Premchand, from Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore to present day, India has always been blessed with a strong literary lineage of writers, poets, intellectuals and thinkers, who have chronicled times, exemplified our open traditions," he said.
The Vice President also said that India is the world's youngest country of its size, and new intellectual churning and questioning, new ideas about society, politics, citizens' activism and youth power are its exciting new features.
He urged the "pseudo politicians" to leave the three Cs of caste, community and cash and go back to "character, calibre, capacity, conduct and compassion" as the only yardstick for measuring merit.