Former top cop and senior BJP leader Kiran Bedi has been appointed as the Lieutenant Governor of Puducherry, where the Congress won the assembly elections last week. She replaces Lieutenant-General AK Singh — who as the Lieutenant Governor of Andaman and Nicobar, was given additional charge of Puducherry in 2014.

“The President of India has been pleased to appoint Ms. Kiran Bedi, to be the Lt. Governor of Puducherry with effect from the date she assumes charges of her office,” a communique from President Pranab Mukherjee’s office read.

Ms Bedi had joined the BJP in January last year, following which she was projected as the party’s Chief Ministerial candidate in the Delhi assembly elections. But her candidature was cited as one of the reasons why the party lost Delhi to Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party.

“I am trustworthy in terms of governance. I’m going to live up to that,” Ms Bedi told NDTV. “The good news is that it is a union territory, which means one can do so much more.”

The country’s first woman IPS officer who served for 35 years before joining politics, said she had considerable exposure to the office during her stint as the secretary to Delhi’s former Lieutenant Governor Tejinder Khanna in 1998-99. “I handled policing, municipal corporation, grievance redressal,” she said.

On Thursday, the Assembly election results showed the Congress has won 15 of the 30 seats in Puducherry. Its ally DMK won two.