A 37-year-old IPS officer who had studied political science at Presidency before being pitchforked into battle with Maoists in Chhattisgarh fatally shot himself in the head with his service revolver at a police mess in Bilaspur on Monday afternoon.

Rahul Sharma, who friends from the erstwhile Presidency College’s Class of 1997 remember as the soft-hearted classmate who went on to become a brave police officer, had asked to be left alone for a couple of hours before a gunshot rang out at the police mess around 1pm.

Mess employees and bodyguards broke open a door and found the superintendent of police, Bilaspur, sprawled on the bathroom floor with a bullet wound in his head. He was taken to hospital but declared dead on arrival.

Sharma’s wife Gayatri is also a Presidencian and a senior railway official posted in Bilaspur. The couple have two children, a friend said.

“My dear friend Rahul Sharma is no more. He was a brave IPS officer posted in (the) Maoist-Naxalite-infested area of Chhattisgarh. Truly soft at heart and at the same time completely dedicated to his job. May his soul rest in peace,” Ranjan Ojha, a friend from his days at Jawaharlal Nehru University, posted on Facebook.

Sharma had returned from long medical leave only two days ago. He had been staying in his wife’s official residence since being transferred from Raigarh to Bilaspur, but shifted to the police mess on Sunday night, police sources said.

“He went to office in the morning and returned to the mess for lunch. He sent his bodyguards away for two hours and this happened. As of now, we don’t have a clue why he shot himself,” a colleague in Chhattisgarh said.

Sharma, whose family is originally from Chandigarh, had met his wife at Presidency when she was studying sociology there.

Gayatri’s mother M.P. Geetha used to teach history at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, but left in 2006 to become the principal of one of the DAV schools in Chennai.

The then head of the department of political science at Presidency, Prasanta Roy, remembers Sharma’s businessman father visiting him regularly to enquire how his son was doing in his studies. “He wasn’t really an outstanding student but was hardworking, and it paid off,” Roy recounted.

Presidencians who knew Sharma said he was a simple man whom everyone in college liked.

“He was an exceptional human being. I had never seen him worked up over anything, so his suicide is a big shock,” said classmate Debojyoti Banerjee, who teaches at Serampore College.

According to colleagues, Sharma’s character remained much the same even while handling one of the toughest assignments possible — combating Maoists in Chhattisgarh.

Dantewada, the hotbed of insurgency in south Chhattisgarh, had seen as many as 20 district police chiefs averaging not more than four months each there before Sharma was posted as the SP. He remained there for more than two years.

“Rahul Sharma’s death is a very unfortunate incident. We have asked senior officers to probe the reason (for his suicide),” Chhattisgarh chief minister Raman Singh said.