Comrade Tarin was born in 1901 to a rural family of the Tarin/Tareen tribe settled in Rehana village, Haripur District, Hazara, North-West Frontier Province. His father was Abdul Jabbar Khan, a village Lambardar and government revenue collector and he tried to give Tarin as good an education as he could afford.
On finishing his college studies, Tarin was not interested like most young men of the time in either seeking a government job or enrolling in the British Indian Army. Instead, he was inspired by the Khilafat Movement and sought to go to Kabul, Afghanistan, and try from there to reach Turkey, and strive in the cause of the Islamic Ottoman Caliphate. In 1920, Tarin and some of his young companions managed to make it to Kabul and there, they found that the Khilafat Movement was quite moribund and that most so-called "Muhajireen" (immigrants from India, in the cause of Islamic Jihad) were merely languishing in the Afghan capital.
He also joined these young men and went with them and eventually ended up joining Minnesota Roy and his senior associates in Tashkent in the then Soviet Turkestan and was present at the founding of the Communist Party of India there, in October 1920.
Tarin and some 12 or 13 other young men were indoctrinated and trained in Communist sabotage techniques and sent back to India, in early 1922, and crossed into the North-West Frontier Province via the Pamirs. On reaching Peshawar, however, they were soon betrayed and arrested as the Punjab Crime Investigation Department had received advance notice of their arrival and alerted the local police.
Tarin and most of his companions were tried and sentenced to hard labour under the article 121-A of the Indian Penal Code, for trying to "instigate" sedition and revolt against the King-Emperor"s rule in India. However, they were mostly released after two years, in 1924, and Tarin returned home to his native village at this time although surveillance on him continued until 1925.
After the creation of Pakistan, Comrade Sultan Ahmed Khan Tarin remained for some time under suspicion of the police and intelligence authorities of the fledgling state but by the 1950s, he was not well and was no longer deemed a "risk".
There is no record of his being in contact with the newly founded Communist Party of Pakistan (CPP, March 1948) and he had no connection with the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951. He died quietly, a neglected figure, in 1970.
Comrade Tarin remained a preponent of Marxist Communism in India, well into the 1930s and 1940s, and was viewed with considerable suspicion in his conservative native region, by relatives like Risaldar Mir Dad Khan and others, who had served the British Empire. Yet he still strove to do his best to bring the Communist message to the masses but without much success. He kept on promoting a communist or socialist political and economic model, at this own level
