(MENAFN- The Peninsula) India's ruling party announced late Monday that former high-ranking policewoman Kiran Bedi would be its candidate for chief minister of Delhi in polls due next month.
The capital will hold state elections on February 7 after almost a year without a government and as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party tries to tighten its grip on power.
"Today the Bharatiya Janata Party parliamentary board met... and decided that Kiran Bedi will fight for the BJP in the coming Delhi election," party president Amit Shah told reporters at a late-night press conference in New Delhi.
"She will be the chief ministerial candidate."
Some 13 million people are eligible to vote in the coming elections for the Delhi state assembly, with results known a few days later on Febraury 10.
The city of some 17 million people has been without a government since last February, when firebrand anti-corruption campaigner and self-styled "anarchist" Arvind Kejriwal quit as state chief minister just 49 days after taking power.
Bedi, 65, came to prominence alongside Kejriwal as a fellow adviser to elderly social activist Anna Hazare, whose 2011 anti-graft drive galvanised India.
Bedi joined the police in 1972 and went on to become India's highest-ranking female officer, working in traffic, prison management and drug control, and later serving as a UN peacekeeping adviser.
She drew global attention as a prison reformer and headed New Delhi's Tihar Jail, Asia's largest, where she introduced yoga and literacy classes for inmates.
Although Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party flopped at national elections in May, he is again expected to be the biggest obstacle facing Modi's party.
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