THE CALAMITY of Kashmir is a wound on a wounded body, it is death arriving in awful majesty in a place where death has become a grubby, ugly, everyday affair. There has been so much man-made dying in Kashmir that if one believed in God one might say that God had become competitive and decided to show the killers, the killers in uniform and the terrorists cloaked in secrecy, what a real killer can do. There has been so much man-made agony in Kashmir, so many young men have been broken, so many women vandalised, so many villages smashed, so much blood spilled on the no-longer-virgin snow, that the bitterness of this natural disaster is not only beyond bearing, it is obscene, a hammer-blow launched against a people who have already been smashed. And now, as if to finish things off, the Himalayan winter is setting in, and the greatest calamity of all may lie ahead of us, not behind.

The Kashmiri winter is beautiful — the frozen ice-sheets of its lakes, the mighty Himalayas wrapped in whiteness like an immense Christo artwork — but it is also cruel. “If there is a Paradise on earth,” the Emperor Jehangir wrote, “it is this, it is this, it is this.” But the real Kashmir is not a place where men and women may live as immortals. Paradise in winter was always ruled by cold-hearted gods. Today, more than ever before, Kashmir is Death ’s dominion.

The messages from Kashmir keep coming, and the note of desperation in them grows louder all the time. As many as three million people are homeless on both sides of the so-called Line of Control, the scar of history slicing across the face of the troubled province. On the Pakistani side of the Line of Control, according to the region’s prime minister, Sikander Hayat Khan, 70,000 injured people are in need of attention. But many roads were destroyed or made impassable, and, according to the Red Cross, relief helicopters have sometimes been unable to land because the throngs of desperate people scrambling towards them have been so large. And the UN says that unless funds are received at once, its fleet of helicopters will have to stop flying in the next few days.

The decision of the Indian and Pakistani Governments to open the Line of Control to assist the relief effort is belated, but welcome nevertheless. However, without an immediate increase in relief funding, it will soon look like a useless gesture. If winter-proof shelters cannot be built in the next month or so, Kashmir will become an icy graveyard, in which literally hundreds of thousands of people will freeze to death. In spite of all the difficulties, the relief effort is taking place.

National relief agencies, private charities and many other humanitarian bodies are getting medicine, blankets, warm clothing and tents into the afflicted area. But, as one Kashmiri journalist wrote to me last week: “Nobody can survive the winter in the border villages in a tent.”

Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue. After the eastern tsunami and the western hurricanes, this is not incomprehensible. But the people of Kashmir deserve better than they are getting. They certainly do not deserve to be subjected to a kind of “political test” of aid-worthiness. Yet, ever since the day of the earthquake, people in the US and Europe have been asking me and many others the same politically loaded questions: will the disaster “ help”? Will it allow India and Pakistan to sink their differences and, at long last, make an end of their long Kashmiri quarrel? It has been hard to avoid the conclusion that Western attitudes to aiding Kashmir are dependent to some degree on the answer to these questions being “yes”.

Alas, the answer is “no”. India and Pakistan are still mired in mutual suspicion, as the saga of the Indian helicopters revealed. (India offered them, but Pakistan refused to accept unless they were flown by Pakistani pilots, a condition that India in turn refused to accept, and, in the meanwhile, the quake victims went right on dying.) Also, as the murder by militants of a Kashmiri moderate politician showed, and as the bombs in Delhi would seem to confirm, there are Islamist groups who are determined to continue to sabotage any improvement in Indo-Pakistani relations, and as long as those groups find sanctuary in Pakistan, a peace settlement will be impossible.

All of the above should be irrelevant to the matter at hand. For more than half a century the world has turned a blind eye to the political problems of Kashmir. It must not now turn its back on the Kashmiri people. If the flow of aid does not increase at once, then it is probable that more people will die in the earthquake’s wintry aftermath than perished in the quake itself. It is entirely possible that the final death toll will be greater than the tsunami’s. We may be looking at the greatest natural calamity in human history. But in this case we have the power to avert it. We can send the money to fly the helicopters and tend to the sick and build the winter shelters. If we do this, people will live. People who have already lost everything may yet be prevented from losing their own lives.

If we can accomplish this, it will be a great good thing. If we fail — because we are tired of disasters, or because Kashmir is far away and remote and quarrelsome and doesn’t feel like our business — well, then shame on us. Shame on us who have our homes and our children and cannot care about those who don’t. I do not want to believe, however, that this avoidable catastrophe will be allowed to occur. But time is very, very short. There is not a day to lose.

Times Recommends

• In the real world, the public sector must pay
• Playing politics in a land of double Dutch
• Be like the plinth people: not set in stone