Exit polls on the Bihar Assembly elections, for which polling ended on Saturday, have predicted that Nitish Kumar could lose the chief minister’s chair to 31-year-old Tejashwi Yadav.

The numbers put out by the pollsters varied but they all gave a clear lead to the Mahagathbandhan of the RJD, Congress and the Left parties over the National Democratic Alliance.

Exit polls have in the past gone both wrong and right and the picture will be clear only on Tuesday when the votes are counted.

Nitish Kumar File picture

Prime Minister Narendra Modi had led the NDA’s campaign, addressing a dozen rallies and even writing a last-minute letter to Bihar’s voters appealing for support for Nitish.

The BJP has been hoping to emerge as the single largest party in Bihar.

The exit poll by Today’s Chanakya for CNN-News 18 projected a figure of just 55 (+/-11) seats for the NDA. It gave 180 seats (+/-11) to the Mahagathbandhan, which would be a landslide victory. The number of seats in the Assembly is 243. Axis My India for India Today TV gave 161 seats to the Mahagathbandhan, again a big victory. Chirag Paswan’s LJP, seen as the B-team of the BJP, was forecast to pick up only a handful of seats.

But the big story coming out of the exit polls could be the emergence of jailed RJD boss Lalu Prasad’s younger son Tejashwi as the new leader of the state. Axis My India found that he was the most preferred candidate for the chief minister’s post, with 44 per cent respondents backing him. Nitish came second, with 37 per cent support.

If the polls turn out right on Tuesday, it would mean that youths across castes had backed Tejashwi, who had made unemployment the central issue this election.