Badat was eighteen years old when the 1976 Soweto Uprising occurred, which shaped his political consciousness and eventually his student activism. Badat served on the student wages commission and the Release Mandela Committee. He was initially aligned to the Black Consciousness Movement, and later joined the charterist United Democratic Front (UDF) following its founding in 1983. Badat was the editor of the Western Cape community newspaper, "Grassroots".