As India and Israel become closer, Palestinians in India say they hope New Delhi will continue to support their cause.
Two famous Palestinians flank the office of the vice chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMI) in south Delhi.
To the left is an auditorium named Edward Said Hall, after the Palestinian American academic, an advocate for the political rights of Palestinians, and a pioneer of post-colonial thought.
Above the doorway of Yasser Arafat Hall, which is to the right, an Urdu poem is inscribed on marble. "Though the dead do die they do not perish," it opens, a valediction to Palestine's first president, who died in 2004. For one student on this campus, Maphaz Ahmad Yousef, a 27-year-old postgraduate in the department of Peace and Conflict Resolution, it may as well be a rallying cry.
Maphaz, who came to Delhi from Gaza in 2013, explained that Arafat and former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi were "like brother and sister" - a closeness which reflected India's staunch support of Palestine, and which she worries has been eroded during recent years.
"For most Indian people, Palestine is Yasser Arafat," she said. "Nowadays nobody knows about [President Mahmoud] Abbas like they used to know Arafat. I think Indian media does not care about our case like they did before."
When Arafat visited JMI in the summer of 1982, the institution likely looked much as it does today: red-painted brick buildings on marigold-edged lawns, students and their books beneath frangipani trees. But the world around it was quite different.
A postage stamp, then in circulation, pictured the Indian and Palestinian flags billowing in tandem, and declared "solidarity with the Palestinian people".
JMI's then-vice chancellor, Anwar Jamal Kidwai, echoed India's message of post-colonial fraternity as he welcomed Arafat to the school: "Jamia Millia Islamia feels deep affinity with you because we were also born in struggle during the great national movement launched by [Mahatma] Gandhiji in this country against British rule."
The India that Maphaz arrived in had long ago closed the diplomatic gap with Israel. By late 2013, India was the major buyer of Israeli arms, and would shortly vote overwhelmingly for a Hindu-nationalist government that many commentators felt would naturally veer closer still to Israel.
This July, to mark 25 years of the Israel-India relationship, Prime Minister Narendra Modi will likely pay an unprecedented visit to Israel - the first by an Indian prime minister. He is not expected to take the opportunity to visit Palestine.
Palestinian Ambassador Adnan Abu Alhaija and representatives of the Indian government contend that the relationship between Palestine and India is undamaged - indeed, unchanged - by India's tilt towards Israel.
In a telephone interview, Ambassador Alhaija listed previous visits between Palestine and India, including a 2015 trip taken by Indian President Pranab Mukherjee to both Palestine and Israel, pointed to Memorandum of Understandings (MoUs) between Indian and Palestinian universities, and mentioned Indian aid programmes in Palestine as evidence of the relationship's strength.
"The India-Israel relation is bilateral," said Al-Haija. "It has not affected the Indian relationship to Palestine."
'Bride without a bridegroom'
In an elegant office to the west of Delhi, Amarendra Khatua, director-general of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), agreed. "Always we have had a strong relationship with Palestine," he told Al Jazeera. "Israel relationship is tremendous, but that is independent of our relationship with Palestine. That does not affect [it]."
But to Maphaz it seems as though as Indian policy has turned towards Israel, the government's commitment to Palestine has begun to lessen. "Nobody cares more about Palestine like during Indira Gandhi's time," she said. "Nowadays, it's all towards Israel."
She was raised on politics - her father, Ahmed Yousef, has been a senior member of the Hamas leadership - but her first order of business in India was personal. She was here to join her husband, an Indian national, and to earn a master's degree.
She met Badar Khan Suri, a PhD student researching Middle Eastern state building, in Gaza in 2011, when he visited as part of an aid convoy.
Two years later, he was expected back in Palestine for their wedding, but the Rafah border crossing via Egypt - one of the two ways to enter the besieged territory - had been shut down by the Egyptians.
At her marriage party in the strip of land Maphaz described as "our little cage," she said, "I was a bride without a bridegroom." Her friends blew up a photo of Badar and danced to Bollywood songs they'd learned by heart.
She hadn't been in India long when war broke out back in Gaza. Having found Indians welcoming and sympathetic, she was shocked, she says, to discover that the Indian media treated Palestinian casualties as statistics, rather than victims.
That August, Maphaz took the stage at a protest event in the Indian capital as she described what was happening at home. Her family, she told the crowd of hundreds, made sure to let the neighbours know in which room they would all bed down for the night, so they could be found in case the house was turned upside down by an explosion. Gazans identified dead loved ones by their shoes on TV broadcasts. It's how they found out her uncle had been killed, said Maphaz.
By "carrying the voices" of people at home, Maphaz explained, her time as a student in India has been its own kind of resistance. "Many have the wrong idea about Palestine, but we have convinced many," she said. "We will never lose hope in India - in the people. We know they care about our case."
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