Ashish Hemjarani, the CEO of Indian ticketing platform BookMyShow, was questioned by police in Mumbai on Monday following controversies regarding the sale of tickets to Coldplay’s January 2025 shows in India.
This follows allegations that BookMyShow, as an official seller of Coldplay tickets in India, had connections with unofficial resellers, although the company has already denied those claims and says it filed its own complaint with police about the high number of Coldplay tickets that appeared on the secondary market.
The controversies have also put the spotlight on the regulation of ticket touting - or scalping - within India. In an article for the Times Of India earlier this week, Indian lawyer Vivek Narayan Sharma notes, “in India, the legal situation around scalping is murky at best”.
It’s thought that officers from Mumbai Police’s Economic Offences Wing were prompted to question Hemjarani after receiving formal complaints from third parties who had tried to buy tickets for the Coldplay shows via BookMyShow. That includes Amit Vyas, a partner at Mumbai law firm Vertices Partners, who has confirmed to media he filed a formal police complaint about the sale of Coldplay tickets.
Vyas told CNN, “Not a single person that I know in Mumbai and outside Mumbai - I got so many calls from friends in Delhi - no one got a ticket”. Tickets for Coldplay’s Mumbai shows sold out within minutes, with many ticket buyers reporting issues when trying to use the BookMyShow platform. Tickets with a face value of 2500 to 35,000 rupees then started appearing on resale sites at marked-up prices, in some cases as high as 960,000 rupees.
The lawyer’s formal complaint raised concerns that BookMyShow had made tickets directly available to touts and third party resale websites. BookMyShow responded to similar allegations on social media last week. It insisted that the company “has no association with any ticket reselling platforms such as Viagogo and Gigsberg or third party individuals for the purpose of reselling” tickets to the Coldplay shows.
Viagogo has also confirmed it has no official relationship with BookMyShow. In its own statement issued to The Indian Express, it said, “Viagogo is not working with BookMyShow. Tickets listed on Viagogo come from a range of sources, including multinational event organisers, corporate ticket holders, season ticket holders, sponsors and fans who simply can no longer attend an event”.
BookMyShow’s statement added that ticket touting is “strictly condemned and punishable by law in India. We have filed a complaint with the police authorities and will provide complete support to them in the investigation of this matter”.
The regulation of ticket touting varies greatly from country to country, from being outright banned in some places to being subject to just basic consumer rights regulations in others. In India, consumer rights law, including at a state level, provides some rules, but - as legal expert
Vivek Narayan Sharma wrote in his Times article - “the legal situation is murky at best”.
He goes on, “A key case in this regard is Mandeep Singh vs UT of Chandigarh in 2015. Mandeep was caught reselling cricket match tickets at inflated prices and charged with cheating under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. But the Punjab and Haryana High Court acquitted him, noting that since both buyer and seller were aware of the deal, no fraud had taken place”.
In most countries, promoters of shows can prohibit resale in their terms and conditions of the original ticket sale, which then allows them to cancel touted tickets. However, that can be quite a lot of work for the promoter, so even when those terms technically apply, they are not necessarily enforced.
Noting all that, Sharma says that the issues with Coldplay’s tickets in Mumbai “highlights a major loophole in Indian law. Unless ticket sellers make reselling illegal through specific terms and conditions, scalping remains a legal grey area. It’s a case of ‘buyer beware’ - or in this context, ‘buyer be ready to pay double!’”