Are we really regressing?

In all the brouhaha that surrounds the Mangalore pub incident and the moral policing that seems to have our country in its grips, I wish to digress a bit. We all keep talking about how, with such incidents we are going back to the stone ages and are becoming neanderthals all over again. But if you really go back in time, you will see that women actually had much more freedom back then, than they do now.
Sure you would counter it by saying that Indian society was not that liberal. But then think about it, even if women were kept in seclusion, it was because they were respected for being women, not because people were scared that they would spoil the sanctity of society or breech the line of male perverseness. This was on the royal front.
On the more local fronts, the status of homemakers was a hallowed one - now being a housewife is equated with being dumb and not having much else to your credit. In the days of the Raj - men and women did socialise together, they did enjoy a drink or two together. Inter-religious alliances though not commonplace were not really frowned upon.
So can we possibly say that our society is going back in time. Its actually entering a phase that we have never seen before. Mentalities seem to have shrunk to very narrow proportions. The perverted minority seem to have a stronger hold than the educated minority simply because we have a majority who sit on the fence when it comes to taking a stand.