A Youth Congress leader who is one of the fiercest critics of the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala has been booked for inciting riots over a social media post in which he had slammed the CPM for allegedly targeting young Muslim leaders.

Kerala state general secretary of the Youth Congress, Rahul Mamkootathil, had in a Facebook post dated August 16, questioned the CPM over the killing of Muslim leaders. He had listed five victims of alleged political rivalry.

“How many Muslim youths are being mysteriously killed. Although the CPM initially blames other parties, subsequent investigations turn against them. The investigations abruptly end at that moment,” he had written.

The names mentioned in the post were those of victims of alleged political killings over the past several years. Their mug shots were part of the post that has so far attracted over 3,200 comments and has been shared more than 2,300 times.

The FIR was filed at Adoor in Pathanamthitta district based on a complaint filed by the social media cell of the CPM.

The trigger for the Facebook post was the recent political murder in Palakkad in which a CPM local committee member named Shahjahan was the victim. While the CPM has been blaming the RSS for the incident, the second accused in the case — Aneesh — had told reporters that he and three co-accused are CPM workers.

The CPM has rubbished the claim and questioned why would party workers wear typical RSS-type saffron “rakhis” and go around stringing banners for Ganesh Chaturthi and Sree Krishna Jayanti, which the accused had been doing.

While the last word has not been said in the case since an investigation is going on, Rahul’s Facebook post was meant to take a jibe at the CPM that has over the years made inroads into the Muslim vote bank.

Congress MLA and state Youth Congress president Shafi Parambil lashed out at the LDF government for targeting his party leaders while ignoring communal utterances of a Hindutva motor-mouth.

“It is interesting to note the enthusiasm of our comrade’s (chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan) police to book Rahul Mamkootathil without even a complaint while ignoring regular communal utterances of Sasikala,” he wrote on Facebook, referring to K.P. Sasikala, president of the Hindu Aikyavedi.

“The resolve is to continue to make political statements,” Shafi added.

The LDF government has of late been attracting a lot of flak for booking Youth Congress leaders over in-flight sloganeering against Vijayan. Two Youth Congress leaders had on June 13 boarded an IndiGo flight in which the chief minister was travelling from Kannur airport to Thiruvananthapuram.

Once the flight came to a halt in Thiruvananthapuram, Farzeen Majeed and Naveen Kumar, both Youth Congress leaders from Kannur, walked towards Vijayan shouting “Protest, protest… the chief minister should resign”.

The reason for the protest was new disclosures made by a prime accused in a gold smuggling case who claimed the chief minister and his family members were beneficiaries in the racket.

While LDF convener E.P. Jayarajan, who was seated close to the chief minister, stopped the protesters and pushed them down, airport security arrested the two and handed them over to local police.

State Youth Congress vice-president K.S. Sabarinathan was arrested on July 19 for allegedly masterminding the in-flight protest, sparking a war of words between the Congress and the CPM. All three men have since been released on bail.