The second sentence is a fallacy: it's NOT like a Britisher or American not being able to speak English. It's like a Spaniard not being able to speak Italian. Before unification each part of India was its own political entity.
Also read up on the debates in the constituent assembly. There were heated debates on the topic of Hindi as "national language", "only language" etc.
Also, I am pretty sure you are not aware of this, but the national education/language policy of the 1960s said that Hindi speaking areas will learn a non-Hindi language in school in addition to English. The so-called three-language formula of 1968.
It might be worth reflecting on why the three-language formula is not being adhered to.
And: http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2010-01-25/india... "There's no national language in India: Gujarat High Court"
Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China. So it's almost like they're forcing the entire country to learn Beijing dialect.
While Hindi being the national language might have been the decision of a committee, the language itself is not artificial.
More accurately, Modern Standard Hindi (like Modern Standard Urdu) is a committee-standardized register of the Hindustani (also known as "Hindi-Urdu") language. (prior to standardization, "Hindi", "Urdu", and "Hindustani" all referred to the same language, apparently.)
> Mandarin is almost the same situation, except that it is very very close to the native language of Beijing and Northeast China.
Hindustani has 240 million native speakers.
If you count all those people who can speak/write Hindi then the count goes way over 500 Million ....