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Paper short abstract

How India’s deep-tech founders, as innovators and nationalists, become complicit as state narratives, policy and capital flows pivot their innovations toward security, surveillance, and geopolitical power.

Paper long abstract

India’s deep-tech startup ecosystem—building on advanced, frontier scientific innovations—is booming amid a shifting world order and increasing authoritarian governance. While many founders enter this space driven by ethical commitments to solving climate change, their knowledge and products are increasingly pivoted toward state priorities in defense, aerospace, and surveillance. This article ethnographically examines the figure of the deep-tech founder: a youthful, often elite entrepreneur whose identity merges that of innovator, visionary, and nationalist. I ask: What does it mean to be complicit in this context? Complicit to what? I argue that narratives glorifying the nation—both its past civilizational grandeur and its present geopolitical ascent—set the stage for an insidious, everyday complicity. These narratives morally scaffold the founder’s pivot from climate tech to technologies of security and control, framing it not as a compromise but as a patriotic contribution to national strength. Wealth creation becomes a nationalist agenda. Through this case, the paper advances an anthropology of complicity by showing how technically-minded actors navigate, rationalize, and become enrolled in state projects, revealing complicity not merely as collaboration with power, but as a gradual process of alignment forged through the potent idioms of national glory and strategic necessity.