Dhaka, April 18 -- Poet and public intellectual Farhad Mazhar has dismissed the legitimacy of Bangladesh's interim government, criticising it for retaining a constitution shaped under former prime minister Sheikh Hasina's administration-even in the aftermath of the July Uprising.

Speaking at a roundtable organised by the Imaginext Foundation at the National Press Club on Friday, Mazhar argued that the political transformation following the July Uprising had not yielded a meaningful break from the past.

"This mass uprising has not led us toward the creation of a new state," he said. "Sheikh Hasina's fascist constitution has remained intact. I do not think that is right."

"I do not consider a government operating under this constitution ...