The Municipal Corporation of Delhi replaced the Bhagwa Dhwaj--the Maratha Confederacy's saffron swallowtail used by the RSS, as well as the Shiv Sena factions-- with the national Tiranga in the arms of a Bharat Mata statue at Shaheed Park on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg. The switch came on a day The Telegraph reported the anachronistic statue. The park has been closed for redevelopment in which many statues created from metal scrap have been installed.

Shaheed or martyrs park near the Ferozshah Kotla ruins, commemorates a revolutionary meeting at the ruins in 1928 in which the Hindustan Republican Association was renamed Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. According to historian Chaman Lal, this was attended by Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev Thapar, Bejoy Kumar Sinha, Surendra Pandey, Jaidev Kapoor, Kundan Lal, Shiv Verma, Phanindra Nath Ghosh, and Man Mohan Banerjee. Ghosh and Banerjee dissented at the meeting, and later helped the police. A few years later, Singh and Thapar were executed by the British, and Ghosh was assassinated by the rebels.

The park lies in an area where several executions were carried out by the British. Two sons and a grandson of Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar met the firing squad of the East India Company forces at Khooni Darwaza, north of the park-- after their surrender in 1857.In 1915, Amir Chand, Bal Mukund, Avadh Bihari and Basant Kumar Biswas were hanged at jail-- which is now Maulana Azad Medical College, opposite the park--for a failed attempt to assassinate Viceroy Hardinge in 1912.