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.
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.
At the time, India, which would become the first non-Arab country to formally recognise Palestine's statehood, shunned a diplomatic relationship with Israel on the grounds that it was a colonising power.
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.