Rushdie said Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, was already a calamity. But worse could follow if the West permits the "avoidable catastrophe" of the coming winter's effect on the three million quake survivors rendered homeless, he warned.

Rushdie said there had been so much man-made death and agony in Kashmir 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," Rushdie wrote in an article for the British newspaper The Times.

The 7.6-magnitude October 8 earthquake is confirmed to have killed 74,000 people in Pakistan and more than 1,300 in India. However humanitarian groups estimate the toll to be 86,000 in Pakistan alone.

"Meanwhile, it seems, the world is suffering from compassion fatigue," wrote Rushdie.

"After the eastern tsunami and the western hurricanes, this is not incomprehensible. But the people of Kashmir deserve better than they are getting."

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf last week accused the West of double standards for giving more money after the Indian Ocean tsunami because foreign tourists were involved.

Rushdie said it was hard not to conclude that the West would not aid Kashmiris unless it thought it would help resolve the stand-off between India and Pakistan.

"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 earthquakes wintry aftermath than perished in the quake itself.

"We may be looking at the greatest natural calamity in human history. But in this case we have the power to avert it.

"If we fail -- because we are tired of disasters, or because Kashmir is far away and remote and quarrelsome and doesnt feel like our business -- well, then shame on us."

Rushdie was forced into hiding after the late Iranian spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious edict, in 1989, calling for his execution because of alleged blasphemy and apostasy in his novel "The Satanic Verses".

The author had a 2.8-million-dollar bounty placed on his head by a Tehran-based foundation.

Rushdie's latest novel "Shalimar the Clown" concerns a Kashmiri boy who becomes an Islamic terrorist.

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