The Kirti Kisan Party was formed in 1926 by Ghadar returnees, several of them recently back from the Soviet Union, where they had been trained at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. Santokh Singh founded the journal Kirti at Amritsar. Sohan Singh Josh and Bhagat Singh both wrote for it.
It was the main channel by which communist politics entered rural Punjab, and it worked through the Ghadar network rather than through the urban intelligentsia, which is why it took hold in villages.
Its members were tried in the Meerut Conspiracy Case and in later rounds of repression, and the party was merged into and out of the Communist Party of India several times.
The Kirti tradition produced the Punjab peasant movements of the 1930s and 1940s, the muzara agitation in PEPSU, and the Lal Party and Naxalite currents afterward. The red flag in a Punjab village has a genealogy that runs back to Ghadar, not to Calcutta.
That the same men were Sikh returnees from Oregon lumber camps, students in Moscow and organisers in Jalandhar villages is one of the more remarkable facts about interwar Punjab.
It was formed by Ghadar returnees in the 1920s, published the Kirti magazine at Amritsar, and organised among peasants and workers in the Punjab countryside.
A number of its members trained in Moscow, and the party was one of the routes by which communist organisation entered Indian politics.
It merged into the Communist Party and its people ran the Punjab left for the next forty years. Bhagat Singh Ji published in Kirti and the connection between the two organisations was direct.