| Honorific Suffix: | VrC | ||||||||
| Birth Date: | 2 February 1934 | ||||||||
| Birth Place: | Jalandhar, British India | ||||||||
| Death Place: | Jalandhar, India | ||||||||
| Nickname: | Crisis Man | ||||||||
| Birth Name: | Haripal Kaushik | ||||||||
| Unit: | Sikh Regiment | ||||||||
| Awards: | Vir Chakra | ||||||||
| Rank: | Lieutenant Colonel | ||||||||
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Haripal Kaushik, VrC (2 February 1934 – 25 January 2018) was an Indian field hockey player, military officer and television commentator.[1] [2]
He won gold medals in the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 1964 Summer Olympics. He was vice captain of the team that won the gold medal in the 1966 Asian Games, and was later a field hockey administrator and television commentator.[3] He received the Arjuna Award for excellence in athletic competition in 1998.
Commissioned into the Indian Army in 1959, Kaushik served in the 1st Battalion of the Sikh Regiment.
In the early days of the 1962 Sino-Indian War, Kaushik was commanding the forward company at the Battle of Bumla along the border between India and China when the Chinese People's Liberation Army invaded on 23 October. During heavy combat with much larger enemy forces, he led a successful retreat, saving the unit's heavy machine guns and mortars.[4]
Kaushik was awarded the Vir Chakra for "exemplary courage and self-disregard" on the battlefield. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel.[1]
Haripal Stadium at the Indian Army's Mechanised Infantry Regimental Centre in Ahmednagar is named in his honor.[5]
The citation for the Vir Chakra awarded to him reads:
He was married to Prem Bala Kaushik, who died before him in 1983. They had one daughter, Veronica. Kaushik took early retirement from his military service and worked for a sugar mill in Phagwara as a general manager. He also created Goal Getter which was his own brand of hockey sticks.[6] He died at his home in the Jalandhar cantonment, after suffering from dementia for several years.[1] A book titled Camouflage: Forgotten Stories from Battlefields written by Probal DasGupta was released in November 2023 which features a chapter on the life of Kaushik, namely Rise after the Fall of 1962: The Amazing Comeback of Haripal Kaushik.[7]