The Union home ministry today sent a three-member team to West Bengal to visit the areas hit by political violence as demanded by UPA ally, the Trinamool Congress, but the team’s scope of inquiry has been expanded to include the Naxal violence that has claimed the lives of scores of CPM workers.

The team reached Kolkata late evening and will be put up at Raj Bhawan.

Earlier in the day, CPM members in both Houses of Parliament had demanded that the central team should also look into the Maoist violence in the Jhargram-Lalgarh belt.

“The central team will discuss and if necessary visit the affected areas according to their choice,” said Chief Secretary Ashok Mohan Chakraborty. “The team is absolutely free to go and inspect any place of its choice,” he said.

But CPM politburo members, including general secretary Prakash Karat, who were in Kolkata to attend the party’s state secretariat meeting, were not too happy at the central team’s arrival in the state capital. “The Union home ministry took a unilateral decision to send the team to Kolkata. Law and order is a state subject and it sets a bad precedent. The Centre need not have sent this team. In Parliament today, all parties had taken a unified stand against this,” Karat said.

“It is obvious the team is coming at the instance of one party in the UPA coalition,” he added, alluding to the Trinamool Congress.

The team will now look into the growing Maoist menace in Bengal, besides the political violence in the state in places like

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