BMS national vice-president Keshav Thakkar told reporters here on Monday that the ``ILO was working as an agent of the World Trade Organisation to strangulate Indian industry in the name of the clause.''

Thakkar said the Sangh was not essentially against the spirit of the `clause' which helped protect the fundamental rights of the workers as well as rejected use of child labour but it wanted to ensure that the clause was not used as a lever by the WTO to squeeze out Indian entrepreneurs. ``We will definitely oppose our acceptance of the clause being misused for ulterior motives of other developing countries'', Thakkar said.

He claimed the Sangh had information that the clause was being imposed on India at the behest of the WTO, ``and this clearly means something more than just the social spirit of the clause.'' Acceptance of clause brought for an altogether dubious purpose would ``amount to submission of our sovereignty to the World Trade Organisation,'' he added. The ILO, he said, was likely to include it in the guise of a new name.

Thakkar expressed his union's inability to create a movement to tackle the contract and child labour problems in the industry back home in and around Vadodara.

For ``many of them have not become our members.'' At the same time, he maintained that the union had a membership of 10,000 in this city, a fourth of the State's membership.