By Ananya Sharma 
New Delhi, April 28: Tomorrow evening, a lot of Indians are going to be glued to their television screens. Some nervously. Some excitedly. And some just out of habit, because election night, even a preview of one, has a pull that is hard to explain unless you have lived through a few of them.
On April 29, exit poll results for West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala, and Puducherry will finally be made public. All five, on the same evening, in one long, loud, chaotic stretch of television that will run well past midnight.
The actual results come on May 4. But April 29 is different. It is the night when the guessing stops, and the arguing begins.
The Numbers Were Ready Weeks Ago
Most people do not realise this, but exit poll data for several of these states has been locked away with survey agencies for nearly three weeks now.
Assam, Kerala, and Puducherry voted on April 9. Tamil Nadu followed on April 23. The booths closed, the data was collected, and the numbers were crunched. Analysts have known, at least approximately, what the surveys are showing. They just could not say anything.
The reason is Section 126A of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. It is a legal provision that prohibits any exit poll from being published or broadcast while any phase of an election is still ongoing. West Bengal is voting in two phases the first on April 23, the second on April 29. Until the last polling booth in Bengal closes tomorrow, the embargo holds everywhere. No exceptions.
It is not a bad rule, honestly. The logic is simple enough. If projections from, say, Tamil Nadu or Assam start circulating while Bengal is still voting, it could nudge voters in ways that have nothing to do with their own local contest. The law tries to prevent that. Violate it and you are looking at fines, or worse.
So the data has been sitting there. Waiting. And tomorrow it all comes out at once.
When to Actually Tune In
The short answer is from 6:30 PM onwards.
That is when the embargo lifts, and channels can legally start airing projections. In practice, the build-up will begin earlier. News channels will spend the afternoon recycling campaign footage, interviewing analysts who will carefully say nothing definitive, and generally stretching the clock until 6:30 hits.
The real numbers seat projections, party-wise breakdowns, regional trends will start rolling in closer to 7 PM. West Bengal’s projections covering all 294 seats and Tamil Nadu’s covering 234 seats are both expected after 7 PM, according to Zee News. Assam, Kerala, and Puducherry will follow through the same window.
It is going to be a long evening. Worth keeping dinner light.
Where You Can Watch
Zee News TV is going live from 6:30 PM, on television, on YouTube, and on their English website. Every other major channel will be doing the same NDTV, ABP News, India TV, News18 all of them running simultaneous special programming with their own panels and their own projections, which may not always agree with each other.
That last part is important. Different agencies produce different numbers. Axis My India will release its own projections. So will others. By 8 PM, you will likely have several sets of numbers on screen simultaneously, some diverging meaningfully. That is normal. It is also part of why exit poll night is rarely boring.
If you are not near a television, every major news app will carry live dashboards. YouTube will have more live streams than you can count. And social media will be, predictably, completely unhinged but also a reasonable place to track instant reactions from politicians, journalists, and ordinary voters.
Five States, Five Very Different Stories
West Bengal is the one everyone has been watching. Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress is trying to hold on to a state it has governed for over a decade. The BJP has campaigned hard. Harder, perhaps, than anywhere else. With 294 seats at stake across two phases, Bengal is not just the biggest contest in this cycle it has been the loudest, most contentious, most nationally visible one. Whatever the exit polls say about Bengal tomorrow will ripple well beyond the state’s borders.
Tamil Nadu is a different kind of battle. Chief Minister M.K. Stalin goes into the count with his DMK and allied parties holding around 158 of the 234 seats in the outgoing assembly. The AIADMK has 67. Over 5.73 crore voters turned out on April 23, which is a number that carries its own weight. High turnout in Tamil Nadu does not automatically favour one side it rarely does but it sharpens the stakes.
Assam is where Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has governed with visible confidence. The BJP-led NDA holds 80 of 126 seats. The Congress and allied opposition hover around 23. Sarma has run an aggressive campaign on development and identity. Whether that holds up in the numbers tomorrow will tell you a lot about how the northeast is moving.
Kerala finished voting on April 9, which means it has been the longest wait for Left Democratic Front supporters and the Congress-led UDF alike. The LDF holds 95 of 140 seats. The UDF has 42. There is a subplot worth watching here. Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan has been remarkably quiet since polling ended not the usual post-election press rounds, not the public appearances. Nobody has said anything official. But the absence has been noticed, and political Kerala is not short of theories.
Puducherry has just 33 seats and rarely gets the primetime attention it deserves. The All India NR Congress and BJP govern together. The DMK-Congress alliance is the opposition. Small number, but the dynamics are genuinely competitive.
A Word on What Exit Polls Actually Are
Every election cycle, this needs to be said, and every cycle some people still treat exit poll projections as settled fact.
They are not. They are surveys. Voters are asked outside polling booths what they just did, and the responses are aggregated and projected. It sounds straightforward. In India, it rarely is. Caste calculations, regional micro-moods, last-mile voter mobilisation, booth-level turnout variations none of this folds neatly into a survey.
Indian exit polls have a genuine track record of being wrong. Sometimes narrowly. Sometimes embarrassingly so. They are useful as directional indicators, but the number of times the May morning has looked nothing like the April evening is long enough that seasoned journalists tend to hold their headlines loosely until counting day.
May 4 is when the actual picture emerges. Tomorrow night is the opening chapter, not the conclusion.
Your Cheat Sheet for the Evening
Date: April 29, 2026. When to start watching: 6:30 PM Main projections expected: From 7 PM onwards TV channels: Zee News, NDTV, ABP News, India TV, News18 Online: YouTube live streams, Zee News English, major news apps Results day: May 4, 2026
Seats up for grabs: West Bengal – 294, Tamil Nadu – 234, Kerala – 140, Assam – 126, Puducherry – 33
Five states. One long evening. And the kind of political suspense that, for all its noise and chaos, reminds you why elections in this country still matter.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
