The exit polls aren't the only thing confused. Even early trends in the Bihar Assembly elections appear to be picking up the same trend, at least if you go by what's being reported on various channels. The Election Commission website may be only reporting trends in three seats so far, but channels are see-sawing as radically as NDTV nearly calling it for the Bharatiya Janata Party while CNN-IBN has suddenly giving the Grand Alliance a lead.

First, here are the numbers from the Election Commission, which tell us almost nothing but act as a nice tease: leads for Lalu Prasad Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Congress and Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen..



These numbers will naturally change as more electronic voting machines come online and have their numbers get counted, and the bigger players in the game, the BJP and the Janata Dal United, will open their accounts. Meanwhile, the TV news channels, which get their information from the Election Commission as well as from reporters and agents at polling booths around the state, have given a very different picture of what is happening.

On the one hand, there has been a clear trend in favour of the BJP, to the extent that NDTV's Prannoy Roy was nearly ready to call the election for the saffron party as early as 9.15, with proper counting having only begun just about an hour prior.

Most other channels said the same thing: the BJP picking up early trends and managing to solidify those leads. This was enough for party workers outside the office in Patna to start bursting crackers and celebrating. Across in the CNN-IBN newsroom however, around 9.20, the Grand Alliance took a lead in the leads for the first time, suggesting a much closer fight than the other channels.

TimesNow meanwhile, which insisted that it was only going by the Election Commission of India's numbers, saw its lead anchor and editor Arnab Goswami, spend some of his time complaining about the fact that everyone else seems to have different numbers and are ahead of his own. "Fudging numbers is the biggest crime in political reporting in India," thundered Goswami.

Either ways the storyline is unclear. The trend from pre-polling to exit polls suggested a move away from the BJP towards the Grand Alliance, especially as the elections got more communally polarised. The graphs below make this clear, with outliers from particular pollsters. The early morning's indications that the BJP was going to win with a landslide, as some were starting to call it, flies in the face of the exit polling, which suggested a much closer fight. For now it seems this one is going down to the wire.