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.
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 ....
While Hindi being the national language might have been the decision of a committee, the language itself is not artificial.